dylan
i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried
2021
Video installation.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, dylan's work is included in the catalogue but not in the exhibition.
Courtesy of the artist
Artist statement
i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried is a video installation documenting memorials in public spaces where we have lost people to the war on drugs. The memorials are interwoven with a collection of videos of waves from a 4-year archive of the artist going to the water in search of healing. The work carries fragmented layers of poetic grappling with grief trying to catch its bearings in overwhelm at the height of the overdose crisis.
Courtesy of the artist
Artist’s biography
dylan is a queer and trans artist, front line worker, facilitator, and settler working and living in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. they have exhibited, performed, and organized across TURTLE ISLAND and have been a part of several artist/curatorial collectives. dylan’s artistic practice, research, and advocacy work uses a collaborative approach to advocate for harm reduction. they now work at L’Association Québécoise pour la promotion de la santé des personnes utilisatrices de drogues (AQPSUD) doing front line harm reduction and advocacy for people affected by the war on drugs.
Courtesy of the artist
Essay
Heal Me, Inform You, Humanize Them: The Value of Visual Metaphor in the Overdose Crisis
Author Jade Palmer
Artist dylan
Artwork i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried, 2021
dylan’s video piece i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried, begins with harm reduction activist Zoë Dodd’s voice demanding action. Her speech was delivered after she unexpectedly rose from her chair at Health Canada’s Opioid Symposium in Toronto, Ontario in 2018. Dodd’s rhetoric blends factual reports of how criminalization fuels the overdose crisis with her personal grief of having lost loved ones. dylan’s works emphasizes Dodd’s hopelessness with inclusion of an empty screen. The video editing reveals hard truths, though, primes us to ascend on ethereal synths, delve under a chalk-white headstone, and float on waves just out of reach. We are ready to receive dylan’s personal journey through the overdose crisis, illuminated after so much darkness.
dylan is a queer trans artist working in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. The footage of waves they took during trips through Canada and the United States were originally shot for personal catharsis on a cell phone, and they retain the device’s accessible and familiar quality in i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried. These images also serve as a background pulse for the smaller inlaid video taken on Mini DV. This tape format was made popular in home-video camcorders in the 90’s, offering a nostalgic feeling to the intimate footage of dylan’s friends, which is strongly juxtaposed by deadly drug policies. The footage emphasizes personal experience in the overdose crisis rather than cold statistics. Using the more informationbased speech by Dodd as a jumping off point, Mini DV encourages humanization of those stigmatized due to drug and alcohol use.
We are ready to receive dylan’s personal journey through the overdose crisis, illuminated after so much darkness.
The footage of the intersection at rue Milton and avenue du Parc focuses on red carnations. The fence erected here pushes unhoused people from an empty lot on the corner to the sidewalk and the road, which causes people to get hit by vehicles. It is not always drugs that kill those who use them, but stigma-informed alterations of the urban landscape. dylan’s mourning of these people is shown through weaves of carnations in chain links. The flowers are deep red like persistently fresh wounds.
The technique of overlay delivers the piece’s message through metaphor. Dulled opacity allows footage of the fence and the flowers and footage of people to play one on top of the other, visually representing one of dylan’s many poignant lines of poetry at the bottom of the screen, “every overdose death is a policy failure.”1 The inability to separate the images, metaphorically depicts how the war on drugs constantly influences the existence, or nonexistence, of those on the front lines.
By implying to passersby that certain people are ‘invasive,’ the fence manipulates the public’s opinion of this population from the outside. In contrast, dylan’s piece begins its work emotionally by eliciting sympathy and grief from the viewers for those affected by harmful policies. Blame then gets directed to the fence rather than the individual, and dismantling the fence becomes paramount. This emotional response, because it is delivered through metaphor, gently and subliminally slips between the immovable concrete and welded metal of vilification.
As we step away from the dreamlike quality of i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried back into the real world, we must ask ourselves: Where can we also instigate change? How have our opinions been influenced by stigmatized barriers like the fence? How do we instead become the flower that shapes a future in which we do not need to mourn anymore?
- dylan. i cannot hold the ocean in my hands, though i have tried. 2021. MOV file.
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
Author’s biography
Jade Palmer is in her second year of the BA Honours in English and Creative Writing with a minor in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at Concordia University, where she is also a poetry editor at Soliloquies Anthology. She works primarily in poetry that documents states of feminine reckless abandon, and her writing has been published in Beyond Words Literary Magazine.