Hazel Meyer, The Weight of Inheritance—cruising Joyce's house, 2020. Digital video. Courtesy of the artist.
The following text was born out of a multi-month conversation with artist Hazel Meyer on her works The Weight of Inheritance (2019/2024) and Marble in the Basement (2020/2024), and (more so) on inheritance, archives, the w/holes in archives and mattresses (stained & abandoned, and beloved), chronic illness, and the Canadian experimental filmmaker and artist, Joyce Wieland. In 2016, after a serendipitous meeting, Hazel was gifted a ton of Joyce Wieland’s marble by Jane Rowland, the woman who bought and cared for Joyce’s house after her passing. The Weight of Inheritance and Marble in the Basement use this gifting as a conceptual foundation to address themes of memory, lineage and the complex power dynamics of legacy work. Over time, Hazel and my conversations drifted from detailed archival threads in her projects/research, to the ways Wieland has become an entry point for addressing gender and class dynamics in both the broader art world and local housing markets. We also talked about artistic self-doubt, how to trust a leaky gut, and the oozing holes that exist both in our bodies and in the institutional archives we engage with. This text was written as timestamped footnotes to The Weight of Inheritance — cruising Joyce’s house, Hazel's virtual tour of Joyce's home.
With half-painted fingernails I open the email “hello and a ticket?!,” scroll down the list of “a few things Wieland-related” to the “video that takes place in Wieland's house, through an online realtor portal!,” and repeat the familiar: blue link click, pwd: M*****, play.
0:00
Play for a portal tour, a pleasure cruise, or
to see the hole I used most in Hazel’s and my growing email thread pegboard to hold many half-formed thoughts about Joyce Wieland, sick/healthy guts, and healthy/sick archives.
0:36
Listen for Diana’s anthem for self-determination in house and home, which I first heard through the walls of my mother’s bedroom and Hazel first heard while watching Laura Dern be a girlboss in Big Little Lies.
A good song for both karaoke lovers and those only comfortable with I.K. [1], a good song to set the mood.
1:11
Watch for a house viewed through a portal, a portal for collective peeking.
You can’t see it here, but the welcome mat reads: “everything you see is with love and care.” [2]
1:21
Realness before real estate, we scoot around for portal bearings before
1:41
a peek into Joyce Wieland’s home/life through Jane Rowland’s [3] care for her life/home through Hazel’s archiving of their home and lives through a portal.
Research as a series of meticulously indulged impulses. E.g.:
2:54
a peek up at the wall to find the sticky note of important dates, or
3:25
trusting the internal logic of your guts when it comes to dried fruit and research because you never know who might walk down Queen Street and find the raisin they need to invite you into the home of your art hero.
3:48
A house with a plaque as
4:07
a place to hold legacy while
5:22
contending with the pricey reality of owning a home.
Archiving as caring for inheritance in the ways that you can. E.g.:
6:38
Jane meeting free home renovations with contract caveats, or
9:02
re-claiming the kitchen with a circle of Joyce’s kisses [4] (a hole making the shape of another hole), or
10:30
Hazel emailing Jane an old photograph of the backyard birch trees that Joyce planted.
This kind of archiving is rigorous/attentive work and real memory work that makes space for
10:40
slips of the tongue,
11:43
holes in the (basement) narrative,
11:52
and really pouring yourself into it.
A home filled with love and care as a house museum, or a pore in History’s institutionally imbued skin?
12:12
I love these parts when J & J entwine in the mind because as a little bit of Jane slips into Joyce, this narrative nods to the larger importance of lineages of care in both art-making and record-keeping.
Care changes hands and mouths hold old words in new ways.
13:04
Maybe here we acknowledge that poring over someone else’s life often entails pouring yourself into their life and/or their life seeping into yours.
Legacy work as equal parts preservation and absorption?
This is inherently messy work where we start to notice the oozing holes both in our own bodies and the archives we engage with. Especially in the home, where people live full lives, guts leak, and inheritance seeps through time and space and
13:19
in the name of passion/desire/rage Joyce’s paint splatters on Jane’s bedroom floor and
13:48
a bathroom makes me laugh so that my new research purchase/nail polish splatters onto my bedroom floor. (In for 2025: Raisin the Bar as letting it all pour out?) [5]
14:24
This work often means mastering the art of taking things up without taking the thing itself. E.g.:
15:06
the way Hazel doesn’t take Joyce’s cassette racks but instead remakes them for Marble in the Basement [6], or
15:56
the way the moiré valance and the flowery viny trim that lined Joyce’s bedroom/Jane’s office haunt as patterns in later works, or
17:36
the trompe l’oeil marble hooked rug born out of banister neighbours: Jane’s rug collection and
18:48
Joyce’s marble slabs.
19:17
It’s a balancing act of indulging “just wanting a little piece,”
while holding space for our limitations and
20:18
hauntings.
20:39
Sometimes inheritance is so heavy it requires preparation to be taken up. E.g.:
20:49
good shocks and good friends with strong backs because
the way that it dimples the earth can create
21:30
a portal to a whole other life:
a life of lugging heavy metamorphic rock, a life buried under the Weight of Inheritance in all its forms.
22:45
Legacy work is grief work and
23:21
rage work (it’s hard to trust your guts in archival research when your standard of care isn’t passed down the lines of inheritance).
And it’s often transformative work which, like marble, starts out as one thing but when subjected to heat and pressure (or passion and deadlines) becomes a whole new kind of mineral/material mass.
23:57
It’s also patchwork; holes being filled in unexpected ways.
And in the face of a marble void,
24:13
it’s realizing it wasn’t about the marble at all.
(Although marble was craved for a little while, Hazel eventually swapped it out for its beloved trompe l’oeil counterparts: a mattress, a rug, a curtain, a coat, and its very own character foil: Marble herself.)
24:41
Legacy work is work with objects for reasons beyond objects.
It’s researching/recording/indexing/telling a friend/translating/queering/writing/and telling it again.
24:52
It’s a series of projects centering a gap in the narrative and
an artist interview that turned into an ongoing email exchange where questions about mental and physical health are answered with photos of rocks that look like guts, nail polish is bought for its name not its colour, and full flash pictures of alleyway mattresses or any items that look like marble but aren’t marble are the expected sign-off.
25:29
What started without marble ended without marble, and
a peek through a portal became a pore open to new narratives in favour of iterative histories, conversational research, and using the specific to talk about the general in both bodily archives and institutional ones.
The Weight of Inheritance and Marble in the Basement: holes filled towards another kind of whole narrative for Joyce and Jane and Hazel and m/Marble
[1] I.K. aka Internal Karaoke aka singing out loud but only in your mind and maybe even mouthing a word or two when no one is watching. © Hazel Meyer and Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora.
[2] Diana Ross, “It’s My House,” Motown Records, 1979, Accessed December 21, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDPYKteJY-E&ab_channel=DianaRoss-Topic
[3] Jane Rowland bought Joyce Wieland’s house in 1999 and lived there until she passed away in 2017. Jane was a fan of Joyce and she kept many of Joyce’s original objects and designs intact like an unofficial house museum.
[4] Joyce Weiland, Squid Jiggin’ Grounds, 1973, lithograph.
[5] Raisin the Bar. It's a nail polish colour by Sally Hansen. It’s pink purpley silvery and shiny, and doesn't look like raisins.
[6] A multimodal performance and basement style installation which brings Joyce’s marble into dialogue with broader questions of care in legacy work and re-orients towards underrepresented histories within and beyond recognized archives.
Hazel Meyer works with installation, performance and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism and material culture. This work recovers the queer aesthetics, politics and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and chronic illness. Since 2019, Hazel has been thinking alongside the work and legacy of Joyce Wieland with the multifaceted project The Weight of Inheritance/The Marble in the Basement. A Queer History of Joyce Wieland is the project’s culminating scrapbook and will launch fall 2025.
Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora currently works as a writer and critic, as a studio assistant for Tom Burrows, and in archives for artists and artist-run organizations. Yasmine’s practice encompasses video, experimental audio, performance, writing, sculpture, and curating C.L.A.M.—an intermittent series pairing short films with performance art, readings, and the occasional supper club (@_c.l.a.m_). Recent writings can be found in The Capilano Review, ReIssue, C Magazine and Momus.