Face Value
February 19th – March 2nd, 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday February 20th, 7-9pm | rsvp at facevalueopening@gmail.com
The exhibition Face Value explores the complexities of mixed-race identity described by theorist Diana Taylor as “the double-coded neither/nor subjectivity.”
The three artists featured in the exhibition engage in self-portraiture to narrate their experiences of being mixed race women of Caribbean / European descent. In the artists’ work, the mask is the focal point of self-reflexive inquiry ? one that embodies, interrogates, and performs mixed-race in order to destabilize racialized stereotypes. The artists’ use of masks – both literally and metaphorically – challenges society’s ideas of who these women might be, at face value.
Jordan Clarke, b. 1984, Toronto, Canada
Jordan Clarke’s self-portraits span a three-year process in which she produces paintings that represent herself in relation to her understanding of how others perceive the way she looks. Her use of masks both affirms her own sense of identity and challenges the way others see her as neither black nor white, but ‘something in between.’
Jordan Clarke, Nothing is Just Black or White, 2008, Oil on Canvas, 30” x 40”
I initially thought of the mask as a superficial layer of identity – something that can be placed on me by others. I wanted to be seen a specific way, I wanted to be black, full black. Now I have mixed feelings, I’m kind of almost proudly stating that I’m mixed race but at the same time saying that I am just something in between, whatever that is, I’m not sure. In the end, I leave my uncertainty behind and remove the masks altogether.
Erika DeFreitas, b. 1981, Toronto, Canada
Erika DeFreitas uses language to subvert racial categorization. Her series of nine self-portraits enunciate the American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s phrase “I am not tragically colored.” DeFreitas distorts these words by pressing her mouth against a plexiglass barrier. The resulting gestures symbolize a struggle between language and its embodiment, racial preconceptions and self-determination.
I Am Not Tragically Colored (after Zora Neale Hurston) detail, by Erika DeFreitas, 2013-2014, photo credit: Daniel Ehrenworth
There are times when other people will assume that I am from another culture or identity than what I identify as, and there is that feeling of not being who I am in the eyes of someone else, but not identifying with the other that they are assuming I am.
I know that mask means to conceal and to hide. When I was creating the work I was thinking of the mask, not being a literal mask, but how we use language to mask things.
Olivia McGilchrist, b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica
Olivia McGilchrist’s photography and video installation focus on her sense of identity as a white woman born in Jamaica who has recently discovered that her family has African ancestry. Embedding herself in the Jamaican landscape to evoke the ghosts of this unknown ancestry, McGilchrist questions her complicity in the ongoing inequities of her native country.
Olivia McGilchrist, whitey (Discovery Bay), 2013, Photography on banner, 84” x 59”
At face value I’m a white female. When I discovered that I had a great grandmother that was black – it caused me to rethink my Caribbean identity…If I was in another non-white dominant part of the world, I’d feel the same, but here I feel infinitely connected to the land and the sea and the history – the primordial thing that bothers me is the very clear history: we come here, take over, dominate, and you still have to suffer for however long to get over all of this horror.
Exhibition Partners
The State of Blackness: From Production to Presentation
OCADU Student Union
Dr. Kenneth Montague of Wedge Curatorial Projects
For more information, visit: facevaluebyheidimckenzie.wordpress.com