2024

Live Long and Prosper

Steve Danielson and Candace Couse

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Steve Danielson and Candace Couse began their collaboration in 2024, exploring the intersections of embodiment, perception, and disability. Danielson, intimately familiar with the trials of illness, navigated a life punctuated by medical interventions and, in later years, Grand Mal seizures that left him suspended in a state of numb detachment—adrift in a perpetual dreamscape. Born with Spina Bifida, his visible disability shaped the way others projected narratives onto him. He often spoke of how people constructed stories in their own minds, their gaze searching his eyes for signs of presence, asking, without words, whether anyone was “home.”

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A lifelong Trekkie, Danielson found resonance in Spock, a character who, like him, straddled the liminal space between understanding and alienation. “Even if he can’t always be fully understood, under it all, there’s an intelligence,” he reflected. Live Long and Prosper, the collaborative series by Couse with Danielson, seeks to render visible the disembodied, dream-like state of the postictal phase—the blurred threshold between consciousness and absence following a seizure. Through a metaphorical shedding of Danielson’s skin, the works reimagine him as Spock, a figure whose struggle with identity and difference echoes his own.

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Drawing from The Naked Time, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and The Wrath of Khan, the series restages pivotal moments in which Spock contends with his own otherness. In these recreations, the collaborators collapse the boundaries between fiction and reality, using the language of science fiction to navigate the lived experience of disability—of being seen, misread, and ultimately, of asserting presence in a world that too often looks away.

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2024

Comfort Food or a Hard Pill to Swallow

Peter Dueck and Candace Couse

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Peter Dueck’s career as a counsellor was deeply fulfilling, a path he traced back to his upbringing as the eldest in a family of eleven and the example set by his beloved parents. He speaks passionately about his love and respect for people from all walks of life, driven by an unwavering desire to make a difference—to ensure that his life, and the lives of those he touched, carried meaning.

In Comfort Food or a Hard Pill to Swallow, Candace Couse and Peter Dueck mined this rich history of care, distilling the most memorable advice Dueck had given over the course of his career. His words—sometimes comforting, sometimes difficult, but always, in his view, solid—were carefully recorded onto miniature scrolls and encased in plastic wrap. These messages were then embedded into slices of homemade banana bread and offered to recipients across the region with an invitation to document their experience by photographing their plate and sending it back to Couse.

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Blurring the line between fortune cookie and hard-won wisdom, the project serves up counsel— always unsolicited, sometimes comforting, sometimes difficult, and frequently inapplicable very, very good advice. Comfort Food or a Hard Pill to Swallow plays with the idea that advice, like food, is received differently depending on the person, the moment, and the appetite for knowing.

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2024

Taking a Line for a Walk

Shirley Drouin and Candace Couse

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Shirley Drouin was a homemaker who possessed a quiet alchemy—the ability to make something out of nothing. Her son and daughter were nourished not only by her care but also by her deep love of gardening and sewing, skills that wove beauty and sustenance into the fabric of their lives. Though her illness has progressed, Drouin’s hands still remember.

In conversation, Drouin and Couse found common ground in sewing-related sayings—“A Singer sings as it sews,” and “She who dies with the most fabric wins!” One day, Couse placed a sewing machine before her, and in an instant, something bloomed. Drouin’s face lit up as she set to work, taking a line for a walk. She created patterns, checked her tension, and cackled when the stitches defied expectations.

Her body holds her memory. The line moves as an extension of thought—tactile language rendered in motion, resisting erasure.