Métis artist and filmmaker Terril Calder takes an unconventional approach to animation, informed by her multidisciplinary background in performance art, sculpture, and drawing. Often working on her own, she assumes the role of writer, builder, director, producer, and animator. The result of her process is a body of work that interrogates the authority of settler-colonial histories, asking what counts as truth. Her stop-motion films build immersive worlds that call upon these histories and read them against the grain—ultimately exposing the constructed nature of, and biases embedded within, colonial institutions and systems of power. I’ve gotten to know Calder over the past few years, and have come to deeply appreciate her ability to laugh, or make a joke, in the face of an objectively shitty situation. This, I think, is also evident in her work, where she always approaches her subject matter with levity.

To yawn, and to witness it spread through a room, unveils a mysterious inter-connectedness between ourselves and others. Its contagiousness (the immediacy and visibility of its contagiousness), raises questions about what it means to construct a concept of the self that is entirely independent and separate from the ‘other’. In addition, if it is read as a nonverbal and preconscious form of communication, it deviates from how we understand the structure of communication itself. It is not willful or within our control: we do not read or interpret the way a yawn passes from one person to another, we do not choose whose yawns we mirror. It does not follow the order of language, or body language, for that matter.