Subversive curation

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This article was published 18/07/2025 (456 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Spill the tea” and “time is a flat circle” might seem like modern neologisms, but they have deep, long cultural roots as evidenced in a pair of new exhibitions opening today at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq.

Crying Over Spilt Tea, curated by Grace Braniff, assistant curator of art at WAG-Qaumajuq, was inspired by two idioms: “spill the tea,” a phrase from Black drag culture that refers to the subversive sharing of gossip or the revealing of secrets — a.k.a. piping-hot tea, or “T,” as in truth — and “no use crying over spilled milk” which refers to the futility of getting upset over something that can’t be changed or undone.

A Matter of Time, curated by Nawang Tsomo Kinkar, TD curatorial fellow, explores the concept of spiral time, the idea that time, despite having the tidy grid of the modern calendar imposed on it, is non-linear and cyclical.

Both exhibitions draw from the gallery’s nearly 30,000-piece permanent collection.

“It is a lot to choose from,” Braniff acknowledges. “My strategy is to try to narrow in on a very specific idea, and then do a survey of our collection and see what artworks fit in with that idea. And I think tea and gossip, they are very specific, but they’re also universal experiences that everyone has a connection to.”

When you walk into Crying Over Spilt Tea, you are immediately greeted by a massive wall of bone-china teaware, most of it from the United Kingdom. On the opposite wall is Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), a work by British painter Sir John Everett Millais.

The painting shows three cherub-faced little girls (and a pet pug), leaning in close at a tea party, play-acting as grown-up women. But it also functions as a comment on how silly and non-essential gossip was (and is) treated by society — as in, a thing for little girls in bows — because God forbid women share their oral histories.

“Often feminized and racialized people have used gossip as a means to kind of confront authority or to share their own narratives and information outside of what the main conversation is all about,” Braniff says. “This teaware, the pug — both imported into the United Kingdom from China — I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re framed with these girls who are doing this ‘frivolous’ thing, like gossiping.”

In addition to the main themes of tea (and its cultural and colonial symbolism), gossip and truths, Braniff also wanted to explore the idea of virality.

“Because when we’re talking about idioms, they take on this viral trajectory and through that virality, there’s this disconnection, I feel, from their origins. And there, in its representations, we don’t see that gesture to its places of origin or the places it was grown in,” Braniff says.

She is referring to the now-viral phrase from Black drag culture that gives the exhibition its name and has been heavily co-opted online, but one could make the same argument about tea itself.

Like the whisper networks of women before her using gossip to subvert the narrative, Braniff also uses subversion in her curation. On the flip side of the bone-china teaware display is Buffalo Bone China, a 1997 video/found-object installation by Hunkpapa Lakota filmmaker, photographer and performance artist Dana Claxton, whose centrepiece is a heap of smashed bone-china teaware on the floor.

“So, the things we see on the front wall we see back here, broken and crushed up. Dana Claxton was making a commentary on state-sanctioned extermination or eradication of buffalo as a means of control and oppression of Plains Indigenous Peoples,” Braniff says.

During that period in the 19th century, buffalo bones were shipped across the Atlantic to England, where they were made into bone china. Braniff says Claxton is teasing out the complicated history of that material, while also taking apart an item we might see as a simple teacup and exploring its full narrative.

Crying Over Spilt Tea also includes numerous pieces of contemporary Inuit art, including Tarralik Duffy’s 2023 work Red Rose, a repeating pop-art motif of Red Rose tea boxes, and Annie Pootoogook’s circa 2001-02 coloured-pencil drawing The Tea Drinkers, which is also featured outside the gallery on a billboard at the corner of Sherbrook Street and Portage Avenue.

For A Matter of Time, Kinkar leaned into the creative challenge of building a show out of a massive permanent collection.

“I think my approach has been a little bit more playful and about experimentation and creativity and seeing what is in the collection that hasn’t been shown in a long time,” she says

Circles and spirals figure prominently in the works on view, but not necessarily in the ways that are obvious; the room also makes use of curved inset walls, so the gallery space doesn’t feel as angular.

The symbol of the spiral has surfaced across different time periods and cultures, Kinkar says.

“We can trace it back to the Neolithic era. It’s also been found in rock carvings and Indigenous sites across the Americas. It’s been utilized by artists in the later half of the 20th century, specifically in the United States who were involved in movements of abstract art and social art but they’re also rooted in other global traditions of mark making,” she says.

“But one thing that I think remains constant, and one thing that the exhibition is trying to build upon, is that the spiral is steeped in deep symbolism.”

There are a few entry points onto a matter of time — which is also by design — but if you come into the exhibition from Crying Over Spilt Tea, you’ll be met by two juxtaposed works.

Look up and suspended from the ceiling is Waiting for the Shaman, a 2017 work by Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben constructed from polar bear paw bones she has found over the years on beaches. The bones are arranged in concentric circles and encased in clear resin, giving it the appearance that they are encased in sea ice. A space has been left open in the circle for the shaman.

“She’s really drawing here from aspects of traditional gatherings in Inuit communities that revolve around teaching and drumming circles, this aspect of being connected to community and being connected to Inuit ways of being, specifically ancestral time,” Kinkar says.

Across from Gruben’s work is an 18th-century fresco by Johann Januarius Zick, depicting angels in a spiraling swirl of clouds, a space left open in the centre for the Holy Trinity. It’s meant for a church ceiling, but Kinkar has it displayed on a podium as if on an easel.

“I really wanted to have that effect when you come into the space through that entrance, looking up at Maureen Gruben and then being drawn to this circular wall with the gold, and then looking down here and being pulled and drawn to this imagery.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca