Do You Remember Love

Curated by Native Art Department International (NADI), Do You Remember Love brings together artist Susan Mogul’s 1997 video I Stare at You and Dream with a collection of quillboxes from the Museum on Tower Hill in Parry Sound. Juxtaposing these disparate forms of expression, the installation draws out themes across the two bodies of work, including women’s identity, family, relationships, and the quest for home.

Filmed in Mogul’s Highland Park neighbourhood, a predominantly working class Latino area of Los Angeles, the film revolves around the intersecting lives of four people, including the artist, offering an intimate, intertwined narrative that explores familial and romantic relationships as well as how our past informs our present. Mogul’s video is rooted in shared history and enduring relationships, as is the collection of quillboxes. Posing the question “do you remember love?”, the exhibition positions the handmade quill and birchbark boxes as not only expressions of love but as acts of love for self, place, and one another that are to be recalled, enacted, and remembered.

Do You Remember Love, like many of NADI’s curatorial projects, is both a provocation and an invitation, prompting new ways of seeing through connections and intersections. Presenting collections alongside the work of an individual artist, moving image alongside traditional quillwork, the exhibition demonstrates the way ideas and expression span borders, uniting individual and collective.