World Building as Radical Imagination

Evan Tremblay & Mahlet Cuff

Part of the 2025 Media Arts + Technology Residency

It is our pleasure to present a new two-person exhibit : World Building as Radical Imagination in partnership with TakeHome Art House featuring Evan Tremblay & Mahlet Cuff, part of the current Media Arts + Technology Residency opening Friday April 4, 7-10PM.

Evan Tremblay will be presenting The HBC GTE-10,000. The HBC GTE-10,000 draws warm inspiration form the golden age of science fiction: the spare yet portentous prose of Asimov fitting companion to the thin and undulating glacial soils of the Duck Mountains of Western Manitoba. Cloaked in aspen parkland and spruce forest, these have yielded two years’ worth of digital fragments [images, video]. This past November, they yielded up a three-year-old buck (9 points, 225 yards), the artist’s first harvest.

Mahlet Cuff will be presenting I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms). I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms) explores the concept of spacemaking using projection mapping, contemplating the ways in which a space can be transformed as a way to build a Black Queer Utopia.

I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms)- Mahlet Cuff

About the Installations

The HBC GTE-10,000 - Evan Tremblay

“Congratulations on the acquisition of your new Half-breed Cybernetics Good-to-eat-10,000 Years! The HBC GTE-10,000 is a state-of-the-art Living Altar, good for a guaranteed 10,000 auguries, but capable of enduring much longer with proper care...”

The ages recede and advance, as glacier-margins will: 10,000 years ago is the point of differentiation between the Moorhead and Emerson phases of Agassiz: the present roils like that glacial and neolithic inland sea. Radical imagination entails a spiritual terraforming: to sketch a better future becomes an act of world-seeding. What will be the relation of the sacral and digital fires in the cybernetic (Greek kubernetes, ‘helmsman’) postlithic? If such distinction is a passing wave, does union represent the trough? The crest? What dreams may come to pass, when we embark on the reweaving of that oldest basket: oikos, our household?

The HBC GTE-10,000 draws warm inspiration form the golden age of science fiction: the spare yet portentous prose of Asimov fitting companion to the thin and undulating glacial soils of the Duck Mountains of Western Manitoba. Cloaked in aspen parkland and spruce forest, these have yielded two years’ worth of digital fragments [images, video]. This past November, they yielded up a three-year-old buck (9 points, 225 yards), the artist’s first harvest.

Repeated crossbreeding of these fragments, ranging in scale from lichen to landscape, produces a series of land beads - here a single pillar, though we must imagine great hypostyle halls filled with the memory of years - and a two-lobed interactive network, Li Jhyaab Kibernetes (Michif: ‘Kibernetes the Devil,’ ‘the cybernetic devil’) which uses these beads as a referential mesh, fuel for the transformations of visual inputs into a sky of star-bead-flowers. Held between the buck’s crown is a visual input - a black-sun oculus, from which shadows of light are projected, the mingling of the light in the gallery and the motion which blocks it. To move through space, becomes the kindling of fire in an enveloping altar.

Evan Tremblay is a Red River Métis artist whose work focuses on rituals for the reversal of entropy. He is based in the Duck/Riding Mountains of Western Manitoba.

I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms)- Mahlet Cuff

Exploring the concept of spacemaking using projection mapping, the piece I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms) is contemplating the ways in which a space can be transformed as a way to build a Black Queer Utopia.

Cuff, using archival found footage of Black queer people and ones that fit in between the identity, is able to radically imagine a world where cultural reclamation and African retention are at the center of their spacemaking.

The tool of projection mapping acts as a way for Cuff to play with limitless-ness and go beyond the restrictions and constraints of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal heteronormative imperialist world (hooks) that they exist in as a Black queer femme.

Their interest in world building comes from their deep fascination with genres like House, Electronic, and Techno stemming from their practice as a DJ. These genres are inherently Black and move through and around the African/ Caribbean Diaspora but are co-opted and erased in mainstream narratives.

The mapping of movement practices, with the cohesiveness of sound creates a multisensory experience that is grounded in the act of remembrance. The curated DJ set invites the viewer to reflect on the historical and social implications of dance, house, techno and electronic music.

I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms) is an environment that responds to the needs of Black, queer communities, offering sanctuary where the projections are offering a space to dream, reflect, and experience joy.

Mahlet Cuff is a AfroCaribbean queer femme born and based in Winnipeg Manitoba (Treaty 1). They are an interdisciplinary artist, curator, filmmaker, arts cultural worker, writer, film programmer, DJ, performance and sound artist. Using DJing and mixed media as a method of space making they place their intentions with blending various genres as a way to create their own worlds, building and rebuilding to transform dancefloors as a site for liberation.

Through the blending of sound and video, they use critical fabulation as a way to fill in the gaps where the erasure of Blackness when it comes to genres such as house, electronic and techno. Cuff’s work has been exhibited in Winnipeg, Toronto, Windsor, New York, Paris and Milwaukee. As a performance artist they have performed for Interplay_ which is an online festival.