When Jody Pilon responded to PMAC’s Open Call for On Guard for Thee…, she was prompted to consider what acts of resistance might look like in her own life. She began recording them: sharing meals, visiting friends and elders, supporting local businesses, attending cultural events, voting, making things by hand and participating in community life.
What surprised her was what she found. The acts she had set out to identify as “resistance” turned out, in many cases, to be acts of kindness and love.
In 51 Acts of Resistance, those 51 observations become a reimagining of the Canadian flag. The maple leaf is a richly layered multimedia tapestry in which words, images, colour and stitching accumulate and overlap. Look closely, and you’ll find suggestions of nation building: the idea that a country is not simply inherited or declared, but continually shaped through our work, our participation and our relationships with one another.
Repeated cross-stitches represent the act, privilege and responsibility of voting — each a small, deliberate mark of participation. The humble cross-stitch connects generations of women’s labour with the hard-won right to participate in shaping the society in which we live. What might first appear to be repetitive decorative marks become, instead, a reminder that civic life is built through countless individual acts of participation.
51 Acts of Resistance quietly alludes to contemporary anxieties surrounding Canadian identity and sovereignty. Pilon does not answer those anxieties with spectacle or nationalism. Instead, she offers attentiveness, conversation and kindness, recognising that the relationships we sustain help hold a society together.
In Pilon’s hands, the maple leaf becomes less a symbol of statehood than of social fabric: something made slowly, imperfectly and collectively through acts of care.
Perhaps that is the work’s most unexpected act of resistance — to suggest that loving a place and caring for the people who make it home may be among the most consequential things we can do.
