Eyes bore holes through an expanse of white plaster at my left, where on the other side of empty wall hang faceless linear portraits of missing and murdered Indigenous women. They are scattered at eye level like a murmuration of starlings. I’m sitting on a black pleather museum bench in a room bigger than some apartments I’ve lived in, where a sculpture that looks like half of an upturned canoe covered in freshly flayed hides juts through the AGO’s Western wall and points accusingly at me. It knows I’m not well versed in matters of reparation.

It rained hard for two cold weeks in October, weather obstructing my ability to properly appreciate a site-specific art installation from Faye HeavyShield called Adrift at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Adrift is a collection of maybe 30 little acetate rectangles hung with fishing line at various heights in a tiny room by the emergency exit. They are supposed to catch the light from the window wall behind them, which is topped by ancient yellow European stained glass. The AGO has made up for lack of sun, and supplied yellow floodlights on the floor to counter the pervasive grey that seeps through windows tinted for museum privacy. Maybe it’s delirium from repeated sleepless nights caused by art school homework, or the anxiety lingering from hallucinating that the faceless portraits in the other room could see me, but I can’t focus on the way the squares of light in Adrift slide gently across the room. Their effect to me is like a seizure friendly disco ball. People with cameras for eyes come and go from the room. Through the window, a pigeon catches a downdraft and disappears into an orange leafed tree. Across the street, a woman in a red dress appears above an AC unit in a dark window like a ghost. Out the door on my right, one hand-sized figure sketch of a woman with a scribble face and a loosely draped dress stands out among the printer paper portraits.

Faye HeavyShield’s three room installation in the Salle Wilder wing is called, “I’ll Know You When I See You,” and consists of four pieces of art selected from HeavyShield’s larger body of work inspired by growing up in the Kainai First Nations community. The gallery was visited by a school tour the first day I went, and young women in fuzzy socks and beige sandals stood fascinated by the wall text explaining that the canoe-like sculpture is not actually covered in bloody flesh, rather in dyed clothing fabric. That red is a life giving color, and that the speaker inside the sculpture is playing audio of women from HeavyShield’s life. The second time I went, we swapped socks and sandals for sneakers and walking sticks, as a tour of old women passed through. The voice inside the speaker is trying to teach me something. A word is said, said slower, said syllable by syllable, then said again. After taking an Indigenous sculpture tutorial, I understand this to be an effect called cultural communication. I know she is trying to tell me something, and it doesn’t really matter that I don’t fully understand it, because the art is in the artist’s pointing finger.

On the opposite end of the second floor from Faye HeavyShield’s art, there’s another installation – Infinity Mirrors by Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrors is similar to Adrift in that both installations are experienced in a small room with a focus on one material’s interaction with light. Where HeavyShield uses transparent acetate and a window to paint a family of drifting lights, Kusama uses mirrors and a closed space to illustrate the isolation of introspection. One finger pointed out, one finger pointed in. A video of Yayoi Kusama plays while I wait in line to see her installation. She’s a little old Japanese lady with a bright red plasticy bob wig, and she tells a sad story about how her mom threw out her art supplies when she was young. I watch it and fail to forget the way it felt when my mother told me to stop writing. Kusama left Japan / I left America / and found new purpose when / people told her they were moved by her work / my Canadian friend told me if her coworkers could see me perform they’d take back what they said about poetry being dead. I stand next in line to the experience where an attendant in a fuzzy black AGO vest invites me to hang up my coat as the yellow stopwatch in her hand beeps politely and she ushers out the last mesmerized visitors. The attendant casually directs me inside, unaffected by the stunning light beaming from within the installation, and puts my 60 seconds on her watch. Between the limited time, and the surreal feeling of stepping into a pocket dimension, there is no way for my mind to escape the experience of Infinity Mirrors. My body is reflected countless times over, the vivid green and orange of my hair and clothes an offensive interjection to the room of cold sickly silver light. My reflection’s multiplicity mocks my own solitude. If I could access even one of those copies, one of the little round ones in the soccer sized silver balls on the floor, or one of the headshots trapped within cubes hung in a central column, then there might be enough of me to do all that needs done. From this side of the door, the stopwatch beeping feels cruel.

The AGO doesn’t have a video of Faye HeavyShield, but her art tells a story about trying to hold people together in community despite pain. When I return to Adrift, I’m frustrated by its simplicity. Rounded squares of warm light dance along the right wall, and little shadows crawl across the left. The reflections sometimes collide like human lives, kissing ever briefly before passing on. I stay with HeavyShield’s work until my legs refuse to hold me, until I’ve sketched three thousand words in a journal, until the AGO attendant approaches from the corner of my eye. I’m already leaving as she says, “You shouldn’t be writing here.”

My medium is language. Observation begets writing, which begets rewriting, which begets performance, and on in cycles as my voice and my words become inexorably linked. Publication does not The End of a performance poem spell. For example, the text of Lillian Allen’s sound poem, Birth, has changed over the years. The original text, “aha aaaaa ahaa / an’ mi breathe / an’ mi breathe,” became, “aha aaaaa ahaa / an’ mi breathe can’t breathe / an’ mi breathe can’t breathe,” after footage of George Floyd’s murder surfaced and the world heard him tell the police at his neck, “I can’t breathe.” Sound poetry is a kind of living art that centers the present moment. The spoken word poet transforms words into noise that invites listeners to become active participants through snaps, claps, stomps, and eager hums. The same poem read for two different audiences can yield wildly different experiences, in a similar way that a site-specific installation can have different effects on viewers under different qualities of weather, or even when wearing different color clothes.

When I visit art galleries, I find myself envious of deceptively simple installations placed irreverently upon the floor, splashed against the walls, or hung from the ceiling on fishing line. Sculptural artists seem to have unlocked some easy mode of art-making that allows them to tell viewers more in 60 seconds than I could in a whole week of writing. That miserable October, I am in and out of art classes. I pull consecutive full days in the foundry to make a wax sculpture, which needs to be remade into a ceramic shell, which needs to be remade into a hunk of bronze, which needs to be remade into a finished sculpture, which needs to be remade because it broke. I think about HeavyShield cutting out pieces of clear plastic and hanging them by a window, and Kusama painstakingly placing silver orbs inside a mirrored box. At midnight after a literary celebration, I write a poem about unintelligible language in one shot. Months later, I perform it unchanged. My mentor tells me it’s good, and I should perform it for an upcoming tribute to the late sound poet Paul Dutton. Artists spend years of effort, grinding ourselves against our craft, so that when we do briefly see that woman in a red dress through the window while at a gallery about missing and murdered Indigenous women, all we have to do is point.