‘83 Til Infinity: Dive into the World of Hip-Hop in the Ottawa-Gatineau Region

Photographed by Regatu Asefa.

Covering the 1980s to present day, the OAG’s exhibition on hip-hop in the Ottawa-Gatineau region features playful installations and a range of mixed-media works. This exhibition, born out of meaningful collaboration with hip-hop communities and artists, explores the all-encompassing nature of the music genre through its five pillars: breaking, emceeing, DJ-ing, graffiti, and knowledge. I spoke to the curatorial assistant on the project, Regatu Asefa, to get a behind-the-scenes look on how this incredible show came together.

JE: So I had some questions, but I kind of figured a conversation would develop between us, two intellectuals [laughs], as we embark on this. So the first question I wanted to ask is a general question: How did you enjoy working on the exhibit?

RA: I actually loved it – I loved it! I thought it was so fun and such an unexpected experience. I’m not from Ottawa, I was relatively new to Ottawa when I joined the project, I have no ties to the Ottawa hip hop scene, and as a student I’m an emerging curator. So I thought, ok, I have no knowledge of my role, the community – both Ottawa and the hip-hop communities – so I thought it would be a huge learning curve, but it was such an innovative and new project that my lack of experience didn’t matter. Actually, my lack of knowledge was helpful in that people whose stories were being told got to tell them, because at least for myself, I had to step back because I had no ground to stand on. So it was so wild and so fun and I got to meet so many people, and people I would never cross paths with if I wasn’t involved in the project.

JE: Yeah, and I’m glad you actually brought up that idea of being new to it helping with the exhibit because I wanted to ask about the show itself. The show infused so many aspects of art and artmaking, and I think it was non-traditional in a lot of senses, it challenged what we conceptualize an art exhibit to look like. I thought the inclusion of fashion, video, dance, audio, and even furniture and spatiality was really intriguing. How do you think that that impacted the viewing experience and do you think it challenges traditional understandings of an art exhibit?

Photographed by Regatu Asefa.

RA: I think 100%. There’s sort of a prevailing notion of what hip-hop is, and it’s primarily viewed as an auditory experience, it’s music. It’s culturally what we might understand hip-hop to be, but by including all the visual aspects of it – and not just visual – but all the multi-sensory experiences. The immersive, but also the infectious way hip-hop seeps into everyday life. Like the idea of people wearing Air Jordans or sweatsuits, or certain dance moves [that] are rooted in hip-hop. Even hairstyles and speech intonations, those are all rooted in hip-hop and that’s what we were trying to show with the exhibit. Hip-hop is more than what we may think it is, and it exists in so many facets of life that we may not even realize are linked to hip-hop. So for example, in the show, there’s a series by Dion Prints, and it’s her barbershop series and even the idea of sitting in a barbershop and having your hair done and having music play, that connects to hip-hop. One person on the project, maybe Kingsley Swim, talked about how you can hear the women’s nails when they do hair, and there’s a specific scent that’s very rooted primarily in Black culture. Which brings us into a conversation of what is Black culture and what is Hip-Hop culture, and the boundaries there, and the question of “are there boundaries?” So to be able to bring in some of the immersive aspects like in Bear Witness to Peace where you can hear the audio and be in that space, and then with Quest’s Soundtrack Volume.II, where you can sit in the room and experience that atmosphere, it all contributes to that questioning.

Quest actually had a big hand in curating that spot. It was entirely inspired by his Volume.I that was at L’Imagier back in November or December of 2022, but having the old furniture and the TV from the 80s or 90s and the vinyl walls, it was reminiscent of basements from that period where teenagers would go down and hang out and listen to these new cassettes and the new music coming up that would then become hip-hop. So that immersiveness and multi-dimensionality of hip-hop was really the foundation of how we intended to show and incorporate people into the exhibition.

JE: It speaks to the all-encompassing nature of visual culture surrounding hip-hop. I know when I think of hip-hop I think of music video culture to a large degree. You know, that has become huge in all kinds of genres of music now, with visual albums being a more common aspect of releasing music. I love that, even the emphasis of context, of viewing these visual objects within a space curated in the way that you would be viewing them in that time. Especially with Quest’s living room space.

RA: Yeah, yeah. And I think it also adds a whole social dimension, a reminder that it’s a lived experience. It’s not an isolated thing that hangs on a wall on the fourth floor of a gallery. These are really parts of life that exist, and have existed, and continue to exist. I think the OAG was very much interested in viewing this exhibit as a reflection of the community being served; it’s not just still things on walls or on plinths.

JE: Exactly. I wanted to talk specifically about the fashion pieces in the show, I think that was a stand-out for me personally. Especially as you’re talking about this attempt to avoid the stationary, or that frozen sense that we sometimes get in art exhibits. The way that the clothing was suspended off the ceiling with those molds, making it appear as though there were almost bodies inside of them. What was the rationale behind including these street-wear pieces in an art exhibit? And what are your thoughts on the intersection of fashion and art? I think when we think about fashion exhibits at a gallery, it tends to be couture or “high fashion” pieces of clothing, whereas street-wear was emphasized and given that platform, if you will, in the show. I thought that was so interesting and maybe pushes against those boundaries of what people accept within what is considered art.

RA: Yeah! It’s interesting because in the McInnes Gallery where there’s the tag wall, the clothing shown in there are on the breakdancers, and they’re mid-dance, and that actually was Buddha’s (Stephen Leafloor) suggestion. He was one of the founders of CFM and he thought it would be so cool to have the uniforms in different breakdancing movements, and honestly I looked online to find those manipulatable mannequins. It was tricky and expensive to find them, so I thought perhaps it wouldn’t be in our budget, but ultimately the gallery ended up purchasing a few for this exhibition. Obviously with the understanding that they’ll use them again. So that came directly from outside the curatorial expertise of the OAG, that came from the community. As for the shirts and sweaters that are hung on a 45 degree angle, they are super cool, but I have to say I had nothing to do with that. When I walked into the exhibit for the first time, I really enjoyed that aspect as well. That may have been Rachelle Dickenson’s idea, I’m not sure. This exhibit was about showing snippets of the hip-hop community in Ottawa-Gatineau over the last 40 years, and showing that this is an ongoing conversation that has existed without the OAG and will continue to exist without the OAG. The OAG is a pebble dropping into a rolling river that is already going on.

I also liked that you talked about couture and the idea of “high” fashion being a part of exhibitions, that was also… Obviously I think with any exhibition, especially any community-based exhibition, there is a reciprocal benefit to it – I say that having done two exhibitions in my very early career – but it’s about how it will serve them and how it will serve us. That was something that the OAG could offer to hip-hop in the city, this elevated status from quote unquote ‘low culture’ to ‘high culture’ and ‘low brow’ to ‘high brow.’ Sort of challenging notions of hip-hop being in the shadows and the boundaries and the periphery of culture –

JE: And counter-culture.

Photographed by Regatu Asefa.

RA: Yeah exactly, literally it is counter-culture, and it’s also mainstream culture. And also because it’s a four-decade long overview of it, what may have been perceived as peripheral has become more dominant, and by including different artist’s work in the exhibition it’s recognizing the legitimacy of different artforms that maybe have been overlooked in the past.

JE: I felt the exhibit was almost a harmonization of an art exhibit and a history exhibit together. When I walked through the exhibit I thought, I could see this in the Museum of History and it would feel just as natural as it feels in the OAG’s space. I thought that was really interesting, and maybe that would be a critique of the show for some, but I don’t think that is a downside. Maybe that’s just my own combined interests being served. I think it was very well done, I really enjoyed that infusion of the “high” and the “low.” We might think specifically of those furniture items, they’re not necessarily the kinds of furniture that get highlighted in traditional art exhibits, where the focus would be on design, let’s say, but I think it really created such a spatial experience. I think it was elevated as you mentioned before. I thought I’d ask too, just because I know your own research interests are so entangled in this idea of the sensorial and the spatial and the phenomenological, what are your thoughts on how you see this exhibit through those lenses, or perhaps were these ideas that you tried to incorporate within the exhibit?

RA: Yeah. Obviously there is already so much sensory play and overload in the exhibition, and more to come. There is lots of programming that will happen over the course of the show that includes so many other ways of interacting with the exhibition. You can sit on the couches in the Soundtrack II space, and there’s a bench with the Bear Witness piece to sit and be immersed in it. In the adjoining gallery there’s the small kids tables and the bean bag chairs, and there’s a huge vinyl on the wall of Mique Michelle’s bookshelf. There were lots of different conversations about how to include Mique’s bookshelf, due to object constraints. I would have loved to have the physical bookshelf in there and let people pull books off to read. Earlier in the project we talked about working with a production house and having vinyls that you could choose and listen to, to create a different experience. There are still music videos and different dance videos that you can go and listen to, so there is that variation in sensory experiences. Something I would have liked to have included, and I’m honestly not sure how we would have, is scent. It may be something that comes up in programming. I don’t have an insight into that programming, but that may be something that also already exists in the space itself. Kingsley Swim spoke about the scent of different hair products, and even in my own experience –  I’m not part of the Ottawa hip-hop community, but I know a few people in the Toronto hip-hop community, my neighbourhood also has a lot of hip-hop ties –  the thought of having the smell of jerk chicken, or fried plantain came to mind. Again, lots of conversations that need to go around what kind of scents are appropriate or make sense. In my research I focus on the multi-sensory and scent is one of the big senses, it brings people to places, and scent is the sense you remember most. However, again, [it is] difficult and involves huge conversations and is a logistics conundrum. You can have so many ideas, but it comes down to the question of “logistically, how do we even do that?”

JE: Scent is such a tricky one eh?

RA: So tricky! How would you contain the scent to ‘83? It would expand through the gallery.

JE: Yes, you’d be in the Norman Takeuchi retrospective, smelling the scents from upstairs.

RA: It’s interesting, even if, you know, with all these dance battles that had taken place throughout Ottawa’s hip-hop history, you know, the smell of body sweat.

JE: I was going to say too, the smell of smoke machines, because that is such a visceral scent that I can even think of right now. That kind of pungent, sweet, artificial –

RA: – Overpowering.

JE: Then we get into the issue of audience, right. As much as smell is linked most to our memory, it’s also one of the biggest – I don’t have a better term than ‘ick’ factors, or point of overstimulation – of the senses. Then you get into a whole conversation about overstimulating your audience.

RA: It’s also that question of, “Do people want to go to the OAG to smell body odour?”

JE: They might be anyways!

RA: Yeah exactly, especially with the heat of this summer. Not intentional, but glad it was there I guess [laughs].

JE: Then you get into the whole issue of conservation too. You can’t be frying plantain in the gallery, right, and you need that smell to be fresh!

RA: Now that we’re talking about it actually, I’m glad we didn’t include that.

Photographed by Jessica Endress.

JE: What an interesting query. I have been to an exhibit that used scent. The artist had created all these scratch and sniff style pieces. It was so weird, they were sort of like panels on the wall. This was at the Art Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Anyways, it was a bit bizarre. I’m not sure if I enjoyed that. I think it sounds so wonderful, maybe in theory, and I love the idea too, but then it was quite odd. Pre-covid of course, but you had to get so close to the object with your nose to pick up the scent.

RA: I’m already thinking yuck. I’m also realizing that there are outdoor and indoor murals that have been created since the exhibit. So there would have been the scent of spray paint cans, and that is quintessentially a part of the pillars of hip-hop. We’ve established five pillars of hip-hop. It’s one of the artistic pillars; graffiti.

JE: Tell me more about these five pillars of hip-hop that you established!

RA: I did not establish them! I want to make that very clear! [laughs]

JE: You singularly established them, Regatu! [laughs]

RA: The five pillars are emceeing, DJ-ing, graffiti, breaking and knowledge. That’s what we’ve established in the exhibition. They sort of seem to be the five pillars that are recognized in hip-hop beyond Ottawa-Gatineau.

JE: It sounds like there was a lot of community discussion and influence on the curation of the exhibit as a result of feedback from the community. How did you go about that process and making sure you were highlighting the correct, prominent players in this movement and having it be more of a conversation and elevation of the community?

RA: The proposal for the show actually came from Kevin Bourne of SHIFTER, so already the show came from someone who is knowledgeable and connected and experienced in hip-hop in Ottawa-Gatineau – and now SHIFTER is based in Toronto. It came from a point of knowledge and connection to the community, so it wasn’t conceived within the institution. I missed out on the initial working group, and the formation of that. I can only imagine that Kevin came with the proposal and with an idea of a few people that needed to be in from the ground up. That included people like the Executive Director of OBAK, Monique Fuller, the Executive Director of House of PainT, Veronica Roy, and local musician, Luigi ‘City’ Fidelia, Nathan Gravelle at Cap City Hip Hop, Patrick McCormick who is now with Canada Council of the Arts, Buddha (Stephen Leafloor) and others. Then of course that group expanded. The initial meeting with those 5-6 people resulted in a list of so many people that we needed to reach out to. For months, it was just reaching out and going to events that were important. We went to an awards ceremony in November 2022, and from there we learned of DJ Bojangles and Adrienne Codette, and finally met folks face to face who we had been in contact with. This was really word of mouth and entirely from those within the community. It started at that institutional level with House of PainT, OBAK, CapCityHipHop, and Canada Council, and wove into a huge circle of names and people we were introduced to. It was overwhelming how huge and intricate the community is, and really it’s communities. Something I believe Kevin hoped for with the exhibition was that ‘83 would be a joining together of so many communities that are tangentially connected, and perhaps it would give insight to young musicians working now on how their work connects to artists active in the 1980s and 1990s.

JE: Revealing that spider’s web.

RA: Yes revealing, and also revealing that there is an important hip-hop scene in Ottawa-Gatineau. The vastness of this project was overwhelming, and something we hoped to reflect was a space in which members of this community could reconnect with this history, without us also trying to proclaim “This is Hip Hop in the region.” This is really a snapshot that has come out of the Hip-Hop community in the past 40 years. It’s a highlight of some of the stories, and hopefully that came through. We weren’t trying to capture everything, because that spider web is huge and intricate, and it goes so far beyond Ottawa-Gatineau.

JE: That sounds like quite a curatorial challenge, to connect to so many people and try to distill or condense to a certain degree. Of course, it’s one level in the gallery [laughs]. I can imagine that to have so many voices is wonderful, but also it can be hard when you’re trying to amplify so many.

RA: Yeah [laughs]. It’s funny too. So I believe we had two bigger meetings with a group of stakeholders, and these meetings had around 40-50+ attendees. There were members of the working team, different musicians, artists, community workers, producers, managers and even partners of these people. The first meeting I remember, we had a slideshow ready to go to show our ideas, our visuals and the spatial planning we had…. the artists and lenders we already knew. We got through maybe 3 slides before it became almost two hours of storytelling and conversations as I frantically took notes. That so perfectly captured the experience for me, you may be hoping for a certain destination, but you get taken into another direction. And perhaps that thread gets picked up in another show, so it was important for Rachelle to consider which ideas were appropriate for the Ottawa Art Gallery, and which required facilitating other partnerships for these larger ideas. It was wonderful that, at both of these meetings, so many ideas were born and there was such an opportunity for brainstorming among members of the community and for them to network.

It was also a curatorial challenge for myself and Rachelle. She hadn’t had the opportunity to curate a show rooted in music before, and I had only curated a student show previously at the Carleton University Art Gallery. It really expanded my idea of curating, and it was an opportunity to delve into research around community curating, curating with BIPOC communities and curating for music. It is an experience in which curatorial experience does not lead the way, it’s more a facilitation of the storytelling. There are things that I think every stakeholder would do differently, as we all had unique perspectives. I think it’s a unique exhibit in Ottawa, and we’re hopeful that more will happen as a result.

JE: I think too – as you’re talking about the dilemma of so many ideas sparking out of this exhibit – that’s such a positive, and always is, when there are exhibits that are boundary-pushing, groundbreaking or entering new territory, you tend to see a cropping up of more along that subject matter in the future. It almost becomes an incubator, and that facilitation and resource-sharing or networking that you discussed creates a situation in which people that are maybe outside of art institutions have a path of empowerment. Even if the ideas generated don’t fit within the limitations or structure of ‘83 Til Infinity, now that thought or idea has been validated to a certain extent and can grow out of those connections.

RA: Out of ‘83, one artist Andy Akangah was commissioned to create the comic book that accompanies the show. That was a city-funded project and is part of Ottawa Tourism, so it lives beyond ‘83. We were able to connect Andy with Ty Hall who’s a Ph.D. candidate at Carleton University, doing his dissertation on hip-hop in the region. So it was a wonderful coming together of different interested parties and funding connections. That’s one example of one of the goals of the exhibition, bringing together all these different communities that are part of hip-hop. It was very serendipitous.

JE: That reciprocity!

RA: When we talk about those 5 pillars of hip-hop, community is the overarching understanding of hip-hop and that knowledge-sharing. This is especially important to the older members of the community, and their emphasis on sharing resources and information with the youth, it’s a very youth-centric movement in that way. That’s really the idea behind the ‘infinity’ in the exhibition title.

JE: Is there a particular piece in ‘83 Til Infinity that you are particularly proud of or taken with?

RA: Oh! Yes! There are loads, I already spoke about Dion Print’s work, there’s David D. Pistol’s whole series, I love Quest’s stuff. I also love how enthusiastic and eager everyone was to include things that they held onto for decades. I loved the historicity of all these pieces that have been probably living in the backs of closets in shoeboxes, and have moved to different apartments, possibly cities and they kept them. One piece I’m drawn to in particular is Allen Andre’s painting of Travis Scott. I so enjoy the technicality of it, and if you look closely you will notice that there are dancers on the scaffolding and I just think that is such a hilarious detail. His entire series is about these rappers as Roman busts, and referencing almost Hellenistic sculptures and idealizing these figures. The juxtaposition between the technically wonderful painting and then the infusion of rowdiness. That dichotomy of the stoicism of ancient sculpture and the humour.

JE: I think too, that dichotomy exists within hip-hop. That humour, but then this elevation of rappers to god-status. There are also conversations we could get into about the sexualization of women in music video culture.

RA: I think that is what Allen is getting at. He has other works of A$AP Rocky and Chance the Rapper. Thinking about the elevation of these singers and rappers to god-status. There’s such an idea of rap being ‘in the gutter,’ but actually a lot of it is well-researched, clever and requires a depth of knowledge. Unless you’re listening closely or reading along, you might miss the intricacies of it.

JE: The command of language that is required for rap is wild, the level of puns, it requires such a deep understanding in order to play with it.

RA: It really is poetry! It’s an intellectual artform. I think that’s what I get from Allen Andre’s painting, the requirement to look closely, to listen closely.

JE: I think that’s so fun too because it shows, maybe, the flippant reception of hip-hop in certain circles, but also highlights the serious undertones and subject matter that are engaged within the medium.

RA: Yes, poking fun at it.

Photographed by Jessica Endress.

JE: I love that! I have just a few questions left for you. We’ve sort of touched on this a little bit, but did you want to talk about the first show that you curated as well? I know ‘83 Til Infinity was not your first foray into curation. How did the projects differ, and how has that shaped your curatorial practice going forward?

RA: The first show I worked on was Where We Stand at CUAG. The exhibit was part of our course, and Rachelle was actually our project manager, aka our professor. It was very different from ‘83 in that we were working with a pre-selected collection of works. Rachelle and Sandra Dyck, the Director, had already pulled approximately 300 pieces. We also already had a determined theme, place or placemaking, and it was chosen to create a connection with Laura Taler’s show, THREE SONGS. There were already chosen parameters within which we were curating, which of course made sense as it was a new experience for the majority of us. What’s funny is we were warned by Rachelle and Sandra that it may be one of the biggest teams we would work on curating a show, because there were eight of us – now working on ‘83 Til Infinity I think seven collaborators is nothing. [laughs] I think working with a team of this size really prepared me for my work with the Ottawa Art Gallery. I really enjoy that facilitation role as a curator, in contrast to this idea of being ‘the leader,’ especially in the context of community curating.

JE: For my final question, I want to talk a bit about your emerging curatorial practice. I know you’re wrapping up your Master’s now, thinking about your own art historical interests and finishing school–what are you working on now? What’s sparking your interest? Do you have any projects or ideas that you would like space to foster and show?

RA: It’s interesting, my focus is so consumed with writing or stressing about writing, and then there’s a small percentage stressing about my procrastination [laughs]. My research is SO far from hip-hop and even 20th-century art or Canadian art for that matter. I like my research so much, even though it’s a grind right now. I have learned I like the community aspect of curating that ‘83 needed. I’d like to keep that up, it’s so important when curating for communities that you are not a part of, and even those you are! My experience is not the same as someone else's, so unless a topic is hyper-personal, it’s not singularly yours. Going forward I’m realizing that I really enjoy the historical aspect of art, and learning about the lived experience of architecture, so I would love to focus on exploring the socio-cultural aspects of art. I’d like to explore how a show in a gallery would reveal or underscore the social aspect of art, or objects. How do we move away from the label, to being able to experience an object in the way it perhaps would have been experienced, or in an alternative way. I think exploring the movement through an exhibition is such a rich topic. Thinking about how movement through the space is encouraged, and incorporating multi-sensory aspects to shift those movements. Perhaps transferring the focus from the visual and including multiple stimuli.

JE: That is so interesting! We all can’t wait to see your next project! Thank you so much for chatting with me and sharing your insights about this fantastic exhibit.

You can visit ‘83 Til Infinity at the Ottawa Art Gallery, now until February 18, 2024. Admission is free, so check it out!

Photographed by Jessica Endress.