Coney Island Baby

In the winter of 2016, Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Tania Willard, Amy Kazymerchyk and Aaron Leon came together at BUSH gallery to make a film about trapping rabbits. Gabrielle, a previous resident at BUSH and a long-time collaborator of Tania’s, had proposed the project the year before, after speaking with Jeneen about her experiences hunting and trapping in Gwich’in territory. Chandra, a sound artist who heads the musical project Mourning Coup, was invited to score the film, as well as to come trapping. Amy, a curator who has made films, was asked to be the Director of Photography and Aaron, a photographer who had also previously worked with BUSH gallery, joined the group as a camera person. In this interview, four of the artists involved discuss what happened that week and the ideas at the heart of Coney Island Baby.

AMY: Gabe, why don’t you start by telling us about where the title for the film came from?

GABRIELLE: The title of the work, Coney Island Baby, refers to Coney Island in New York, I think it’s Lenape territory, a place that was renamed by colonizers after the wild rabbits that populated that place. “Coney” is an old English word for rabbit and it is also the root word of “cunny,” which leads to the word “cunt,” and is used similarly in a derogatory way. So, for me, the title connects the topic of the film, trapping and raising rabbits – which is a feminized and often diminished kind of labour – to the idea of bunnies as feminized and sexualized, like ski bunnies and Playboy bunnies.

And I also wanted to talk about Indigenous women’s and feminized labour without essentializing or falling back on a gender binary. Without assuming that everybody identifies as a woman, and acknowledging that there are men that trap and raise rabbits too. Which isn’t to say that this labour is not gendered, just that it’s more complex than binary. Maybe the way to put it is that when labour is feminized and racialized, it is also often devalued, no matter who does it.

AMY: Your first idea was to shoot the film at Jericho Beach, in the centre of Vancouver, but we ended up shooting at BUSH gallery. What precipitated the change?