Cecily Nicholson

As an artist, collaborator, and coordinator, you have been a significant presence in artist-run culture and programming for some time now. What art and organizing practices do you note building connection and transformation? Are there bright examples that come to mind, or future happenings or collaborations that you hope for?

Manuel Axel Strain

It’s the people. Vines [Art Society], Joint Effort Collective, Defund 604 . . . What makes these spaces feel meaningful isn’t the programming: it’s who comes together and what happens between them when they do. I’ve been learning to value all the relationships in my life differently. [To value] relationships not built on criticism or judgment, but something more open than that. Liberation is good. That’s what I hope for: spaces where people feel that. I don’t always know what the next thing looks like, but I know it starts there.

CN

Liberation is good! And spaces that foster that sense seem rare. Vines Art Society’s mandate considers “intersections of art, connection to authentic self, connection to community, and connection to land.”¹ Joint Effort and Defund 604 (@defund604), though not overtly arts-based in mandate, connect all the time through creative work. What are you noticing about how social relations converge around the arts? What are favourite artmaking practices in these moments and how do they connect to community?

MAS

I suppose I have a counter question: What constitutes a community, and what is “art,” even – what can be a practice? I imagine art is everything and nothing. The boundaries we draw around it, what gets called art and what doesn’t, who gets to be a community and who doesn’t. These distinctions start to become less useful to me the longer I do this work. When I’m with people at Vines or at different events, I’m not thinking about an art practice. I’m thinking about what’s happening between people.

CN

I appreciate the counter. I agree in some ways and am realizing the limits of the language. Regarding distinctions around art, particularly in the centring of objects, I guess I was thinking about what you said earlier about relationships through art being more important than the object. So for this it seems some agreement about the meaning of “art” is constituted by way of that relationship. As in, it is something, even if that something can change and transform. Does this feel right?

I do find vague and reductive uses of “community” to be useless, worse even. Glad you’re resisting that here. I guess I think about community similarly: as what’s happening between people. I care about the ideas of practice and rehearsal in this regard. With writing and in collaboration I constantly have to try and learn and repeat methods. If I have an art practice, it is inseparable from my work and relations. I have also witnessed many people through the years seeking to be recognized by a community and as artists.

MAS

Yes, I definitely agree with what you are saying.

CN

I have observed how you gather in support of medicine and share your drum and voice amid some of the hardest conditions in the city. How do we interrupt an audience, a public, or our own tendency, even, to be aloof, or to remain detached from having empathy and compassion for the brutal experiences of others? What alternate structures, forms of care, and relations are necessary?

MAS

Be present in conditions that most people find reasons to avoid. People’s avoidance and aloofness aren’t really about not caring – I think they’re about protection. People don’t know how to be with suffering that isn’t theirs. So I try to encourage something different.

I hope people can start to embrace their own discomfort as a teacher in all relationships. A lot of my work comes with the radical acceptance that there are a lot of things I can’t fix. And part of what’s generative about this is the bringing together of the mind and heart, letting things actually land instead of trying to control them, and just trying to feel everything.

Of course, feeling everything can be overwhelming, too, so it’s important to find ways to stay somewhat grounded. I think about rocks. Their history, what they’ve witnessed, what they’ve been through. In Coast and Interior Salish stories, rocks are people. They’ve seen everything and they’re still here. There’s something in that that I come back to.

CN

I appreciate all of these observations. Thinking in relation to rocks also puts me in mind of this quote from Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, who writes, “there are stone witnesses / even on the road less travelled.”² Aware of teachings shared by Peter Morin, of Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s contemplation over the years of stone and Cree syllabics,³ and reflecting on the “still lives” of David Garneau’s paintings,⁴ I find affinity with the glacial erratic and the capacity stones have for movement and relationality. If animated, in relation, with memory, and having the capacity for transformation, it becomes impossible to cast aside rock as a commodity. I’m trying to remember – have rocks found their way into your painting, performance, or installation work?

MAS

Rocks have been in my installations. I once made a work where I ran with a rock from the gallery to the shore of the Burrard Inlet.⁵ I also collect rocks, and have great admiration and respect for them. I’m currently trying to understand their role as teachers: What can we learn from rocks and how they move through the world? It’s a strange concept, but when I start to imagine it I understand the principle of the earth’s classification as a rocky planet, and how we, as parts of the earth, relate. Does this mean that when I ran with the rock and brought it to the inlet that it was really running me? And what can this understanding teach us, in terms of freedom? How does something holding everything together – like the rocky crust of the earth – teach us to be free, to be liberated and anti-carceral? How does it teach us to be free from authoritarian regimes, systemic racism, settler-colonialism, cisheteronormativity, and global economic inequalities? The list goes on, like the infinite nature of rocks.

1. Learn more about the Vines Art Society at www.vinesartsociety.com. ↩︎
2. Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, “Day 73,” 100 Days (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016), 28. ↩︎
3. See Jeremy Allard, “Cheryl L’Hirondelle: where the voice touches (((acts, utterances, transmissions for freedom)))” Li Isprii, March 22, 2026, https://www.liisprii.ca/magazine/2026/ cheryl-lhirondelle-where-the-voice-touches. ↩︎
4. Ed. Arin Fay and Nic Wilson, Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2025).
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5. This performance took place on July 17, 2021 as part of Strain’s solo exhibition The Perpetual Runnings of the Intercessors, held at the Seymour Art Gallery, North Vancouver from June 12 – July 24, 2021. ↩︎