Pamela E. Curates

Women's Arts Resource Centre Gallery, Toronto

January 18 - February 15, 2014

This group exhibition featured multidisciplinary work from the Toronto-based artist collective W5 Art Collective. Drawing upon their individual and collective experiences as women of diverse immigrant origins, Buseje Bailey, Grace Channer, Alexandra Gelis, Margie Macdonald and Alexandra Majerus explore innovative artistic practices which act as visual and sonic mappings exploring cross-cultural histories, stories, places and environments. Investigating the relationship between landscape, migration, memory and social-political issues, together their work brings an awareness of how the interplay of movement and rootedness, be-longing and identity can be re-presented using new media and time-based technology, while focusing on the material conditions under which varied communities live, work and know.

Formed in 2011, the collective members have worked individually with community groups and organizations in an atmosphere of creativity and respect for differences for over 20 years. Drawing upon their experiences negotiating complex multicultural urban, rural and suburban environments, their mission states: “we recognize the interdisciplinary role that art plays in contemporary lives and fully embrace the radical changes of practicing art in the world today.” 

Presented in association with PATTISON Onestop's Art in Transit program and Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Toronto from July 21 – August 29, 2014

Confluence: Shifting Perspectives of the Caribbean brought together artworks produced by 11 artists with cultural ties to the Caribbean. 

Cocurated with Sally Frater for Third Space Art Projects. 

Confluence presented the work of Nicole Awai, Sandra Brewster, Charles Campbell, Delio Delgado, Polibio Díaz, Zachary Fabri, Jérôme Havre, Karyn Olivier, Sheena Rose, Wayne Salmon, and Natalie Wood. 

Commissioned as part of Art in Transit, the project appeared on PATTISON Onestop digital screens and included subway platform monitors in Toronto, shopping mall screens across Canada and PATTISON billboards along the Gardiner Expressway. 

Drawing inspiration from the geographical term that references the meeting of two or more bodies of water, the artists work addressed myriad subjectivities and concerns yet all in some manner or form embodied the notion of movement, collectively touching on a range of themes such as hybridity, the performative, migration and transformation, highlighting a notion of a space that is always in flux, refracting and shifting to illuminate new perspectives.

Art Gallery of Peterborough

January 13 to March 4, 2012

Co-curated with Carla Garnet, this group exhibition explored the recent histories of feminist activism, racism, animal drag, and the poetics of personal journeys, by featuring selected works by Rebecca Belmore, Emelie Chhangur, Johanna Householder, Pamila Matharu, Nadia Myre, Natalie Wood, and Christina Zeidler. Using the language of exhibition to investigate relationships between video and sculptural artworks, the work looks at received notions of "otherness" offering a means to (re)negotiate and subvert binary opposites in modernist culture: order/chaos, nature/culture, mind/body, reality/illusion, high art/low art. Shown in juxtaposition the respective works put into play terms like “alterity” or “otherness” and "critical pedagogy," signifying a balance between theory and practice.

.Art  Gallery of Peterborough

March 2 - May 10, 2010

Co-curated with Sally Frater for Third Space Art Projects.

Comprising over a decade of Simpson's work, this solo exhibition explored new configurations of space, subjectivity and power. Her work is influenced by mapping practices, the West African textile tradition of thread pulling, and portraiture in a highly personal form of pointillism. Through subtraction and addition, the works strike an intriguing balance between the contemporary and traditional, as well as between abstraction and realism. Not only does Simpson construct and deconstruct her own personal history in this work, on a broader level she decodes the very foundations and structures of modern culture, from art & language to community. Cartographies explores global modernity and identity as fluid and continually unfolding, brining the post-colonial and post-modern into dialogue. Simpson's multi-layered paintings are conceptual maps to be deciphered and explored.

Project Gallery, Toronto

March 19 - April 1, 2015

This exhibition was presented in conjunction with Nia Centre's annual exhibition EXPOSED which promotes and showcases the work of emerging Toronto-based artists of African descent. EXPOSED 2015, was the third incarnation of this yearly project. Skin Deep presented photographic and video portraits by six artists (Yannick Anton, Ella Cooper, Anthony Gebrehiwot, Jah Grey, Kara Springer, Carolyn Roberts) addressing the visualization of presence and its relationship to various notions of representation, subjectivity and the body.

Each artist brings a diverse point of view and critical eye, interrogating the place and positioning of contemporary individuals and historical figures within the public sphere as activated through the camera’s lens. From empowering assertions of Black female being within the iconic Canadian landscape, insightful ruminations on loss explored through minimalism and disembodiment, to markings of individuality within the faceless urban realm. 

Complex, poetic and celebratory, together their work engages and encourages new ways of knowing and recognizing the visual, the visible and the viewed.

SPACE, London UK

February 4-13, 2011

Presented as part of SPACE studio's Canadian artist residency programme. This open-studio exhibit brought together Canadian and UK based artists whose material and cultural practices incorporate varied strategies of play and rhetoric to create and imagine new relationships to history, language and cultural identity. Featuring both emerging and established artists, Leo Asemota, Roland Bastien, Sandra Brewster, Kareem Buchannon, Lucie Chan, Stephen Fakiyesi, Brendan Fernandes, Raimi Gbadamosi, Dana Inkster, Ekua McMorris, Grace Ndiritu, Camille Turner and Robi Walters, the artists' approaches to media and subject share an affinity for remixing personal narratives, fictional personas, coded references and allusions.

Creating and re-interpreting through photography, printmaking, drawing, digital imagery, text and video, the selected artists also have a particular awareness of their positioning as agents of change. While some draw attention to notions of post-colonial subjectivity, exploring the relationship between the self, body and ideological forces though mimicry, masquerade and disguise, others source iconography related to both vernacular and commercialized popular culture, recycling everyday materials in assemblage and participatory installations that question mass consumption, as well as communicate stories of the past, while imagining narratives of the future.

The artists point out the vital roles that translation, re-construction, performativity and play factor in the cultural representation of globalized modernity that shifts continually and simultaneously across time, space and place. Negotiating, transmuting and juxtaposing cultural signs, symbols and materials, these works declare as they question, toying with ambivalence rather than oppositionality.  In all its various forms, their work testifies to a transcultural permeability of cultures – from playful reversals to more serious subversions against discursive arrangements of knowledge and power.

Gallery 101, Ottawa

Oct 25 to Nov 30, 2013

Grounded in the veracity of transitioning environments, Bounty was a solo exhibition by multi-media artist Chikonzero (Chiko) Chazunguza which explored his subversive take on the ongoing inequalities of exchange between contemporary Africa and the Western world.

Born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, educated in Bulgaria, this installation showcased the artist's creative practice reflecting his experiences living and working across three continents. Comprised of mixed media paintings, photographic images as well as a performative piece, together this work interrogates the intercultural nature of the contemporary globalized world and issues related to post-colonialism, such as "belonging" and "access" made evident through hybrid ambivalent configurations that explore connections between commodity, class and the body.

Merging the figurative with abstraction, Chiko achieves an effect of compositional resonance in multilayered paintings incorporating fragments from recycled pop cans, cardboard and newspaper flyers, highlighting his interest in producing new forms of visual knowledge from discarded materials. Here lines of waiting figures (or human queues) and photographic images of systemically organized every day objects (captured on camera and cell phones throughout Ontario's urban landscapes, including Ottawa), act as recurring motifs - metaphors reflecting acts of fortitude while suggesting possibilities for revolt and unsettling chaos, creating ideal metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex hybridized character of the 21st century.

He further explores notions of scarcity and abundance in his interactive performance work titled "Tigere Muupfu," which means "sitting pretty" and which literally translates to "sitting in food" addressing shifted food values as misappropriated yardsticks for happiness and well being. 

Images provided by All rights reserved.

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, January 19 – February 19, 2012

Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, January 19 – February 29, 2012

28 Days brought together the diverse work of Canadian artists with that of their international contemporaries in the United States and the United Kingdom to explore the staging of Black History Month. Featuring works by artists Leo Asemota, Radcliffe Bailey, Sonia Boyce, Sandra Brewster, Delio Delgado, Godfried Donkor, Denniston Ewan, Stephen Fakiyesi, Dana Inkster, Roshini Kempadoo, Wangechi Mutu, Keith Piper, Rob Pruitt, Dionne Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Camille Turner, Nari Ward, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Presenting print, video, photography, painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, the exhibition examined the confluence of history and memory and its relationship to contemporary art and representational space. Celebrated in the US and Canada in February, and in the UK in October, the annual observance of Black History Month has sparked increased debates in recent years about the value of a designated month committed to the history of one particular race. While some artists refuse to show their work during Black History Month in exhibitions as a political stance against the marginalization of their practices, others feel it is one of few opportunities they have to participate in the broader cultural landscape, particularly with work that addresses issues of Black identity and visual culture.

At the current moment, in which the idea of “Post-Blackness” continues to be debated within contemporary arts discourse, the ways in which the politics of representation are related to Black History Month is also being questioned, particularly within our increasingly globalized environment. 

Exploring the impact of African diasporic and Black expressive cultures on the evolving geography of global contemporary art, the artists create an international dialogue that complicates and transgresses prevailing notions of representation, memory, history, nationalism, and identity as they are presented in the site of the gallery. 

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Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts, Hamilton

March 1 - April 13, 2013

Erika DeFreitas' interdisciplinary practice explores the influence of language, loss and culture on the formation of identity. Through performance, public interventions, relational exchanges and photographic documentation, her process-orientated works investigate constructs of memorialisation though conceptualist strategies. The installation, Deaths/Memorials/Births is a re-imaging of a project focused on the artist's archive of obituary, memorial and birth notices collected daily from the pages of the Toronto Star newspaper between 2006 and 2007. Leavened by an interest in the affective power of the disruptive gesture and minimalist aesthetics, DeFreitas systematically cut away the announcements' original images and texts, painstakingly replacing back resonant words which form a compelling series of metaphoric narratives. The product of this act is then digitally photographed as a means of questioning authorship, the extent of absence, and the limits of time. The display includes a methodical compilation of the original newspaper remnants coated and preserved in beeswax, testaments to lives lived, to labour endured and to inevitable passages

Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto

May 4 - June 6, 2006

Presented in collaboration with Wedge Curatorial Projects for the CONTACT photography festival. 

This solo exhibition featured large-format colour photographs selected from three bodies of work created between 2003-2006. Drawing on the semiotics of photography as well as the tools of conceptual art, Remix explored the role representation plays in the construction of identity, perpetuation of culture and distribution of power.

In the context of this work, representation, paraphrasing, recreation, and re-contextualization become powerful strategies to affirm and contest a African/American/Canadian identity, proposing a different approach to a portraiture of differences and similarities.  Each portrait series, taken in Canada and the US, captures the artist's  immediate environment-friends, family and oftentimes his own image in order to question and explore the politics of location in our contemporary globalized culture. 

Combining diverse elements drawing from hip hop culture, theatre and the language of advertising, Petros uses strategies that mix and blend with image and fact with fantasy in an attempt to challenge the viewer's assumptions about artistic authority and authenticity. The work points at how different systems, cultures, artistic and political contexts can be put together in such a way as to provide for new understanding, breaking down the power that rigid concepts of race and class hold in our culture, while redefining the photographic image as both document and metaphor. 

His methodological approach is located in between ethnography, performance art, photography and traditional portraiture painting. Some of the images have the look and feel of snapshots, as unmediated  realism, unencumbered by artifice and self-conscious construction, while others are carefully constructed and hyper dramatic. The photographs seek to deconstruct and (re)contextualize the images presented to reveal the ways in which perceptions of Black subjects have been informed and constructed by Western photographic practice, the visual arts and the media. They also touch upon political and cultural dimensions concerning not only the translations of languages but of cultural contexts between location and dislocation, home and "re-settlement" and contemporary constructions of race and class. The work also points at how different languages, cultures, artistic and political contexts can be put together in such a way as to provide for mutual understanding without having to sacrifice difference in the interest of assimilation.

February 24- March 17, 2015

Caribbean Corner, Toronto

Presented by  Third Space Art Projects. Philadelphia-based artist Karyn Olivier . Olivier installed a functioning library inside Caribbean Corner store in Kensington Market. Free Library. This work was conceived as a social sculpture project exploring the community grocery store in Toronto as a site engaging cultural identity, nostalgia, Caribbean intellectualism and pedagogy. The exclusively Caribbean library was open to all patrons of the market.

The books  were organized and arranged on shelves alongside the customary products and provisions sold in the store. This is a trust library with no library card necessary, no proof of residence required, no specific date of return. Borrowers were only asked to return the book(s) when they are finished digesting them. The hope is for this library was to expand on what we imagine the “consumables” of a market to be—particularly when that market traffics in nostalgia for home. 

Daniels Spectrum Artscape, Toronto

July 16-August 30 2015

Co-curated with Magdalyn Asimakis

This year, the Pan American Games are held in Toronto. An event of this size inevitably affects our city economically, spatially, and socially. For a period of time, these games bring together diverse people in conversation, spectatorship, sport, and protest.

Between Spheres opens in conjunction with the games and presents the work of ten local and international contemporary artists who explore issues of identity, human relationships, place and movement through the use of balls, spheres and cyclical objects. This concept is rooted in the early use of the rubber ball, an object that was engaged with various aspects of life from the time of its invention in 1600 BC. An early contribution to sport in the Americas, this was an object that also represented life cycles, and was engaged with astrology, warfare, and human sacrifice.

Similarly, today these forms hold numerous functions and symbolisms. Both in sport and visual culture they are catalysts to particular kinds of social relationships: the convening of people from different places and cultures, the assemblage of communities in protest and verbal collaboration. These relationships raise a number of questions that the artists in this exhibition address through the use of spheres and the exploration of cycles. Together, their works activate circular forms in order to probe into questions of place and identity. They also initiate conversations referencing the ancient and ongoing narrative of these shapes. Through this lens, we consider the ongoing relevance, complexity, and functionality of these compelling structures.

Artists: Adrian Blackwell, Michael Chambers, Elicser Elliot, Agnieszka Foltyn, Gianfranco Foschino, Jérôme Havre, Daniel Griffin Hunt, Mark Prendergast, Dionne Simpson, and Marcelo Suaznabar

Shadows to Silver - A Retrospective explores over 25 years of exhibiting in the career of photographer Michael Chambers. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Chambers immigrated to Canada in the late 1970's making his home in the city of Toronto, where he currently resides. The artist's rich and expansive practice is represented by photographic work surveying diverse representations of the human form. Best known for striking black and white imagery emphasizing the power and beauty of the nude Black body, this solo retrospective exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s activist career. His catalogue of work is akin to significant international artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode Lyle Ashton Harris and Robert Mapplethorpe renowned for their transgressive photographic practices, however Chambers’ oeurvre has been rarely engaged within these critical and curatorial frameworks.

His images displace the conventions of advertising photography, negotiating a delicate balance between the political demands of making the Black body visible and desirable as well as subverting norms expressed by the fashion/beauty industry. His work often finds the slippage in that the same images acts as both marks of identity as well as compelling illustrations representative of these style industries. This retrospective exhibition will allow visitors to understand Michael Chamber's diverse output as a multifaceted whole, from the portraits of celebrated Canadian artists and musicians made during his tenure as a senior editor at WORD, Toronto's iconic urban magazine, to rare coloured gum-bichromate prints, a series on AIDS awareness made through the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, and a new series exploring African identity through Albinism.

Grimsby Public Art Gallery
June 11 - July 31, 2016

Artists: Simone Aziga, Julia Brown, Sonya Clark, Danielle Dean, Erika DeFreitas, Tamara Huxtable, Megan Morgan, Olivia Neal, Dionne Simpson

Curated with Sally Frater

This group exhibition brings together established and emerging artists whose work provides visual exchanges between craft, contemporary art and constructions of identity. Given that both craft and what has commonly been thought of as women’s work are often defined along gendered lines, this exhibition will address and explore the realm of this work away from traditional roles of the “feminine." Employing either materials or methods that have historically been affiliated with craft (including sewing, weaving and embroidery) the artists engage with these forms outside of the ways in which we normally encounter them, creating sites for new frameworks of engagement. Collectively their symbolic and innovative interpretation of materials and materiality act as vehicles for eliciting emotional responses and as objects of aesthetic contemplation. In concert with the notion of the transcendental, through a range of media, including video, fibre arts and installation, the artists’ works explores a variety of issues including the embedding of historical narratives, racial stereotyping and violence, and the globalization of labour and culture.

Erika DeFreitas' enigmatic stitched works reveal archetypal forms made evident through shrouded bodies; Dionne Simpson’s paintings feature delineated canvasses that are influenced by West African weaving techniques and explore architecture and the social structure of urban spaces; Danielle Dean’s video-based work reveals the contentious intersection of capitalism, consumption, and popular culture; Julia Brown uses video to document issues of labour and vanishing methods of production; Megan Morgan uses textiles as a tool for connecting to familial and national identities; Olivia Neal employs unconventional materials to construct tapestries that act as an archive of personal history; Simone Aziga’s multimedia practice interrogates the intersections of fashion, gender and oppression; Tamara Huxtable uses embroidery as a means of documenting everyday incidents of racialized micro and macroagressions; and Sonya Clark fuses vernacular, readymade objects with materials such as hair to comment on history, violence and cultural traditions.

Exploring historical and contemporary connections between Newfoundland and the Caribbean diaspora

Angela Baker, Sandra Brewster, Alison Duke, Roxana Farrell, Anique Jordan, Bushra Junaid, Wayne Salmon, Tamara Segura, Anita Singh, Camille Turner
 

Co-curated with Bushra Junaid
September 9th - October 18th, 2016
Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John's

Through performance, installation, cuisine, and an exhibition of new and existing works by Canadian-based artists, New-Found-Lands investigates historical and contemporary connections between Newfoundland and the Caribbean diaspora. This multidisciplinary project explores the 300-year history of Newfoundland-Caribbean trade in salt, cod, rum and other mercantile products; reflects on personal ties and varied histories of movement and migration; reveals connections between Newfoundland and Caribbean culture and language; and includes an Afrofuturist performance and archival laboratory which uncover buried truths about Canada's role in the transatlantic slave trade. Together this engaging work brings new perspectives to the respective islands from a diversity of practices and approaches.

 

May 21 - September 11, 2016

Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa

Contemporary artists Lucie Chan and Jérôme Havre employ immersive multi-media installations to explore the transient nature of human connections, communities and territories in an era of cosmopolitanism. Both artists address liminality and space (both psychological and physical) through visual and spatial play bringing to light relationships between people and environments, particularly within situations of social transformation. The liminal, which is defined as a space of the “in-between” defies categorization and allows for the exploration of states of being between past and future identities and further into notions of transculturalism and cultural fluidity.

Lucie Chan assembles multi-figure ink, watercolour and pencil drawings with digital prints and animated video to create composite structures that suggest suspended states of being. Jérôme Havre’s scenographic environments include sculpture, photographic imagery and wall paintings to explore speculative ways of engaging with diverse audiences and reflect on perceptions of "otherness". The artists’ works propose an investigation of the changing notions of selfhood and challenge the way our identities are forged through alterations related to mind/body, conscious/unconscious and location/displacement. 

Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa

February 27 - May 7, 2017

This exhibition brings together photographic works by Toronto-based artists Yannick Anton and David Ofori Zapparoli whose respective imagery share a community-focused and collaborative approach to documenting urban life and its people. Zapparoli has represented the visual history of Canadian cities for over 30 years, the majority of his work is informed by a strong social realist approach. Until 1999, he had focused on the public housing development of Regent Park, putting a human face on the stigmatized and transitional community of which he had been a part of since his teens. Anton’s candid and energetic photographs draw stylistic inspiration from the youthful, street, fashion, music and queer-positive cultures that he captures.  Together both artists' compelling works present unique and unapologetic insights into diverse landscapes and lives, addressing the systemic barriers that they expose and refute, while re-imagining regimes of the image away from fixed inscriptions of race, gender, class and corporeality.