An Artist's Point of View
Inspired by Coquitlam’s Riverview Collection, I consider what a patient-centered, art-based, alternative history of Riverview might look like. My approach is informed by Mad Theory, a perspective that recovers the insights and experiences of (often gendered, racialized, colonized, othered) people who do not conform. Mad Theory respects the full humanity and knowledge of those deemed “mentally ill.” In the title, I alter a common line from obituaries to suggest a question at the heart of archival efforts: while the archive overflows with information, what does the archive not tell us?
My entry point is my grandmother, who was a patient at Riverview Hospital for nearly thirty years. Multiple stigmas of incarceration and mental disruption as well as geographic distance effectively erased her from day-to-day family life and from the awareness of some grandchildren. However, her position as incarcerated subject is not definitive: she was also a social spark, talented hairdresser, strong swimmer, loving mother, and talented maker with textiles. My personal goal is to reciprocate her making practices by creating textiles for her and to restore contact with her descendants in installation pieces that bring the institutional asylum of Riverview and the domestic space of Mackin House into tension.
Artist Biography
Nadine Flagel is a self-taught fibre artist whose mission is making art out of “making do.” Her artistic practice centers on the reuse of worn clothing, most often in quilts and hooked rugs. At their core, rug hooking and quilting are labour-intensive acts pulling together elements that were not originally designed to be side by side into new juxtapositions of texture, colour, and form, generating new meanings.
Flagel recently held her first two solo exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest. She publishes articles on art, teaches fibre art at Maiwa School of Textiles and community centres, has received grants to make art with youth, and has collaborated on a public art commission in Richmond, BC. She is a member of CARFAC and Craft Council of BC. A Vancouver settler, Flagel gratefully acknowledges that her life and work are made possible by the stewardship by the Skwxwú7mesh, səlilwətaɁɬ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm peoples of this unceded land.
You can find Nadine Flegel online at: www.nadineflagel.com/
Instagram: @nadine.flagel.artist