We Should Be Dancing
Forest City Gallery
June 17 - July 29, 2023

The ghosts in the walls whisper, “I can make your dreams come true... come on and dance with me.” Chiffon-draped bodies spin into moth wings. “We’re lost in music... feel so alive, I quit my 9 to 5.” A loved one glimmer across the TV glass. “Leave your cares behind... these are the good times.” Was that you?











“The radical possibility of the dancefloor is that it does more than simply fantasise or re-create pleasure. Going to a contemporary Disco night offers more than an escape into nostalgia. We Should Be Dancing reminds me that in the language of dance, rehearsed together, we find affectual attachments that cross through each other, cross through time. Lingering feelings attempt to become one, even if that one-ness is impossible to grasp, even if we are always dancing alone. This possibility, even if phantasmagorical, is not only a shimmer of queer possibility, but an inflection of ghostly communion, a spectrality that shades the movement of the Disco dancer. It shadows the repetitions and rhythms of co-dancers; the dancers become a medium of memory, memorial, through which the visitor to We Should Be Dancing passes in relay, a relay between the work that re-enacts the dance and the visitor as a ghostly trace of movement, tranced in becoming. Smit’s work recalls a dual experience of identity, the echo of someone else’s experience through their imperfect translation of memory vis-à-vis film, and the tactility of touching Disco through the personal traces that remain: photographs, garments, memories passed on through conversation. This affective exchange is a sort of distant touch, a spectral graze with knowing glances...

We Should Be Dancing follows the glimmers of residues scattered across family lines, diffused in memory—the traces of us fused to garments, to memory objects. Importantly, Smit’s work refracts and makes fantastic the Disco where the artist isn’t only dancing for herself, but for the ghosts that haunt the frame of the now phantasmic discotheque. Re-enactment becomes not only a way to re-engage with the past, but is queer labour, memory work. Smit’s We Should Be Dancing speaks to the desire to find the nuance of self-discovery through resampling the family archive, the scenes of her Maman’s Disco era, and recreating the atmosphere of trying to dance backwards in time. Smit’s work also speaks to the precarity of this doubling, to find eerily trances and traces, contours of self out of its perceived boundaries of time. Just out of grasp, yet shadows touch shadow as billowing dancers lost in a hall of mirrors, as the lyrics of Sister Sledge’s Lost in Music remind us, “We’re lost in music (don’t take away our music).” - Morris Fox

Full exhibition text: “We’re Lost in Music”: Disco as Fantasy, and the Spectrality of Mediated Memory in Josi Smit’s We Should Be Dancing by Morris Fox

Desire will take you through the day (oncidium shadow dream 2023)
Inkjet prints on film, disco balls, silk flower stem, wood, lights, acrylic, steel wire.








Desire will take you through the day (oncidium shadow dream 1977)
Inkjet prints on film, disco balls, silk flower stem, wood, lights, acrylic, steel wire.








Left: Spun by Sterling, we dissolved into moth wings in the spotlight (dance floor silhouettes)
Center: Spun by Sterling, we dissolved into moth wings in the spotlight (communal body haze)
Right: Spun by Sterling, we dissolved into moth wings in the spotlight (disco ball dispersion at 5:23)
Sublimation prints on chiffon, brass hangers, brass chains, disco ball motors.












Left:  Spun by Sterling, we dissolved into moth wings in the spotlight (the lovers’ saturday duet)
Right:  Spun by Sterling, we dissolved into moth wings in the spotlight (disco ball dispersion at 9:24)
Sublimation prints on chiffon, brass hangers, brass chains, disco ball motors.











Dancing dancing, our feet keep dancing dancing dancing through the night until morning light shines on us (a rumour has it that it’s getting late)
Video projection.
84 mins.
2023








This project was generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

                 
© Josi Smit 2025