oh-oh Canada: Sweet Treats for Unsettling Futures

This photo essay offers a brief introduction to the hybrid curatorial/collaborative project oh-oh Canada, which I launched in Ottawa on Canada Day, 2016, as a performance art action at Parliament Hill. oh-oh Canada alludes to the way Canadians enthusiastically consume a set of narratives that characterize the nation as “peaceful, welcoming, and benevolent; a country built through diplomacy” and asks that we/they consider what is missing from these accounts. It does so through the free distribution of a line of “unsettled” maple sugar candies created by artists Adrian Stimson, Cecily Nicolson, Lisa Myers, Peter Morin, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, David Garneau, Michael Farnan, and myself. Given away at patriotic celebrations and other community events, the candies inject overlooked narratives into public and domestic spaces, practices selective commemoration, and the individual bodies of members of the public. Through a short description, Artist Statements, and images of the launch and the candies themselves, this essay situates oh-oh Canada as an intervention into the primacy of dominant narratives that shape the nation’s “preferred memory” in the contours of a settler colonial mindset.