2023
performance
Created as part of the exhibition “Truths that Remain.”
Curated by Sarah Nesbitt
SBC Gallerie in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke
sh|r|ed serge is part of a series of performances that extend my longstanding practice of tampering with iconic forms of “Canadian” material and visual culture. These acts of deconstruction and reconfiguring draw a throughline between beloved national symbols and their role in historic and ongoing colonization in the lands now called Canada. In this durational performance the material I disarrange is the red serge uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
Celebrating its 150th anniversary in May 2023, the month in which the performance took place, the RCMP is a quintessentially Canadian symbol. As represented in popular culture and common-place Canadiana, the figure of the RCMP officer, usually depicted in the red serge uniform, is seen as an emblem of measured and moral justice. In reality, the RCMP is deeply implicated in state violence connected to colonization and white supremacy both in the past and present. The iconic red serge uniform dates back to the inception of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873, which, having been established by John A. Macdonald to ensure a nascent Canadian sovereignty and police western territories, evolved into the contemporary RCMP. This timeline places the red serge at the epicentre of colonial state violence intrinsic to “westward expansion” with the NWMP being instrumental in duplicitous treaty negotiations, assaults on Métis resistance, and the forcible removal of Indigenous children to Indian Residential Schools, a practice that continued well past this time-period. The contemporary RCMP continue to perpetuate violence and repression tied to racism and colonization as seen, for example, in the ways racialized bodies are over-policed and state structures are “protected” through the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders.
In sh|r|ed sergeI painstakingly dismantle and destruct vintage red serge RCMP uniforms by first picking them apart into their component parts and then slowly “shredding” them with a hand cranked mechanical device. In this performance I gesture towards the past and present impacts of the RCMP as an enforcement arm of the colonial project and an emblem that reinforces the illusion of “Canadian” values as diplomatic, fair-minded and just, while also offering interruptions to both. As in all my work, I implicate myself in the structures and mythologies of settler colonial whiteness.
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