Membership Residency: Jera MacPherson

Membership Residency
Jera MacPherson
July 2024

Continuing with Neutral Ground’s first iteration of the membership residency, Jera MacPherson will be the next resident in NG’s space! 

Jera MacPherson (she/her) is a cultural worker, happily tangled in the arts ecology of the prairies—specifically Treaty 4 and Regina. Motivated by feminist themes of class, craft, and religious rebellion, she has been published with BlackFlash, Capilano Review, Galleries West, and Peripheral Review. Her visual art practice explores the same themes through textile and performance in DIY and community settings. Of settler ancestry, her great-great grandmother came, pregnant with her great-grandmother, from Denmark in 1927.

This mini-residency will be spent developing an installation that explores the topics of labour, community, and humiliation via the rituals of baptism for the dead practiced by the LDS (aka Mormon) church. As a teen, I voluntarily spent Saturday mornings being physically baptized over and over on behalf of countless deceased women. This, a facet of LDS temple work, was what I understood at the time to be the most valuable way I could be volunteering my time and body to the betterment of an ‘eternal’ community. I find myself interested in making art that problemetizes the unique power structures I’ve participated in as a Mormon. However, these power structures are not so unique. As an ex-mormon and cultural worker, my interest extends to how non-profits also hinge—by design—on the exploitation of well-meaning, moralistic labour.