The most obvious link between the work of Dagmara Genda and Marigold Santos as it is hanging in the main-space at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston (as Homelands), is a formal one – the handling of medium. Both artists have created large-scale pieces composed by the fluid assembly of several smaller, intricate line drawings. It is a technique requiring the viewer to move in close to the pieces, examining individual image-clusters in a detailed analysis that is hopelessly belied once the viewer steps back out again to try and perceive the drawings as a whole. The second link in this show, motivated by the curators themselves, is the grappling of cultural identity as it is played out through Genda and Santos’ childhood experiences of immigration. Both artists compose a series of soft sequences that follow a non-linear negotiation between their own memories, cultural fables, and ‘real’ political history in a narrative that, ultimately, ends up in the present – with the artists themselves.

But I would argue that there is a third, more sophisticated and slightly subtler dialogue happening between the artworks of Genda and Santos in this exhibition. Both artists evoke a kind of ‘mythology’ through the content of their drawings – but it is a seemingly opposing rather than complimentary use of mythology. Genda, for instance, uses satirical images of Josef Stalin to challenge the way he once attempted to position himself as the philanthropic benefactor to Polish history. Her viewpoint is an interesting one that reveals a mixture of her close Polish heritage and her Canadian sensibilities. Santos, on the other hand, maintains the mythical status of her borrowed figures, using them in a kind of futile bid to hold on to the undulating memories of her early life in the Philippines. However, these competing formulas – political mythology vs. cultural mythology – actually embody what Lévi -Strauss identified as the common structural nature of myth. If, as he argued, “myth is language…a part of human speech”, then the drawings of Genda and Santos refer to the past in order to explain their identity in the present, the future and the past in the same way that myth possesses an ‘operational value’ that reveals timelessness (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 1963, 209).

Homelands runs at Modern Fuel ARC until October 23