Address:

56 Queen Street, Port Hope, ON L1A 3Z9
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Category:

Theatre Music Visual Arts and Entertainment

Event Details:

Critical Mass invites you to a Reception, Artist Talk, and unveiling of a Public Art Installation at Town Hall during Hibernate Festival on Family Day. 
You are invited to the official unveiling of – áhsire: ceremony is where you are.

Drop in: between noon and 2:00 p.m. 
Meet the artist and see the new artwork in the foyer of Town Hall.

12:15 p.m. Artist Talk with Raechel Wastesicoot (followed by a Q&A session)

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áhsire: ceremony is where you are is a contemporary Indigenous beadwork and textile blanket crafted in 2024 during a 9-month artist residency with Critical Mass in partnership with STEPS Public Art's CreateSpace national artist residency program, and generously funded by CN Railway. 

This blanket explores the figurative idea of place, and what makes something, somewhere, or someone feel like home. It is based on the artist’s personal experience in ceremony, specifically in moon ceremonies (experienced by Indigenous women/non-binary/gender fluid), and the idea that “ceremony is where you are”.

Woven into this project, are also memories shared from the Port Hope community, showing how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s experience of community and relation to place is sacred in unique and similar ways.

áhsire was made possible through the generous guidance, teachings & mentorship from Iakonikonriiosta and with assistance from Heather Coates. 

Raechel Wastesicoot is a mixed Kanien’kehá:ka beadworker and land-based communications specialist. Her mother’s family is from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, and her father’s family immigrated to Toronto from Northern Italy in the early 1960s. Her spirit name is Mein-gun Kwe, meaning wolf
woman, which was gifted to her by an Ojibway Elder. Following a teaching passed down to her: from the land, for the land, and by the land, her beadwork comprises contemporary pieces featuring upcycled, vintage, and harvested materials. With the land and sustainability at the centre of her approach, the pieces she creates aim to have as minimal an impact on the environment as possible, and heavily feature gifts from the land, including antler, fur, hides, and porcupine quills.