Daze Jefferies: Stay Here Stay How Stay
Guest Curator: Emily Critch
stay here stay how stay is the first major solo exhibition for this Newfoundland and Labrador artist who is making waves on the regional and national scene through her artwork and writing. Evoking a playful and slippery counter-historical approach to transfeminine belonging in Newfoundland and Labrador, this exhibition turns to the ocean as an archival body, to dream and speculate against outmigration and loss in the colonial historical record. Guided by mermaids as spectral trans foremothers, and using archival gestures of repair and preservation, Jefferies honours the impermanence and continuity of intergenerational transfeminine knowledge. Rural trans pleasure and touch are embodied in an assemblage of textile and wax sculptures, illustrations, woodcuts, sound, text, and projections. Responding to contemporary and historical discourse about trans and sex worker bodies, an entangled narrative of care, intimacy, and resistance emerges from the coastal margins.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with essays by Sonja Boon, Emily Critch and Daze Jefferies. Publication date to be announced.
Join us for the opening reception on February 9 at 7pm!
About the Curator
Emily Critch (they/she) is a Mi’kmaw and settler curator, writer, and artist from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk Territory (Bay of Islands, NL) currently based in St. John’s. Their recent curatorial projects include “falling through our fingers” (2023) and “these are our monuments” (2021) with the Owens Art Gallery, NB, “mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew” with the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador (2019) and the Tina Dolter Gallery (2020), NL, and “Visiting: Logan MacDonald” at Grenfell Art Gallery (2018), NL. Critch has published exhibition texts, reviews, and essays with several venues including Eastern Edge, The Rooms, Eyelevel, and Visual Arts News. Her artistic and curatorial practices have received support from ArtsNL and Canada Council for the Arts, and they were the A.C. Hunter Public Library’s inaugural Indigenous Storyteller in Residence (2023).
About the Artist
Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Her multidisciplinary research-based creative practice engages with the ocean as an archival body to form washy, wayward, and with/held counter-narratives of queer, trans, and sex worker worlds at the water’s edge. What emerges from this speculative assemblage is a story of touch, drift, and transition that finds hope and continuity in the changing North Atlantic. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Eastern Edge Artist-Run-Centre (NL), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (NL), Struts Gallery (NB), Owens Art Gallery (NB), and Galerie de l’UQAM (QC), among others. She is the author of the poetry chapbook “Water/Wept” (Anstruther Press, 2023), and co-author, with Sonja Boon and Lesley Butler, of “Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands” (Palgrave, 2018).
To learn more about Daze Jefferies: https://www.dazejefferies.com/
Image: Daze Jefferies. with/holding (2023). Mixed media, digital illustration, maternal grandmother’s handwriting. Courtesy of the artist.