Face Value
Curated by Heidi McKenzie
In the fall of 2012 I continued my studies through the assistance of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship at OCADU in the MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice. I chose to focus my thesis research, writing and exhibition project on the nuances, trials and implicit marginalization of three mixed-race part Caribbean artists: Jordan Clarke, Erika DeFreitas, and Olivia McGilchrist, a painter, a conceptual artist and a video artist, respectively. Each of these women ‘performed’ their mixed-race identity through their art.
Erika DeFreitas
From the Series, A Vocabulary for Hands in Mourning
Archival Digital Print, Size T.B.D., 201
Jordan Clarke
White Façade
Oil on Canvas, 18" x 24", 2010
This is the curatorial statement associated with my MFA thesis from 2014, the exhibition catalogue, the short video artist talks, as well as my curatorial video statement, that were mounted as part of the exhibition.
“These artists engage in self-portraiture and deploy the mask as a trope in order to narrate their experiences as women of mixed Caribbean/European heritage. The central premise of this exhibition is the notion of inter-subjectivity − the shared interplay between two individuals’ experiential worlds. As it pertains to the mixed-race artist, performance theorist Diana Taylor describes inter-subjectivity as a double-coded neither/ nor subjectivity. The artists’ use of the mask underscores this double-play of subjectivity. As a focal point, the mask facilitates the artists’ self-reflexive inquiry that embodies, interrogates, and performs mixed-race in order to destabilize racialized stereotypes. The use of masks, both literally and metaphorically, challenges society’s ideas of who these women might be, at face value. Implicit in the exhibition are the following questions: can there ever be an absolute congruence of understanding between the person being seen and the person doing the seeing? And, does the way someone appears accurately reflect that person’s identity within a biracial or mixed-race context?” February, 2014
Olivia McGilchrist Ernestine
Bamboo Avenue Digital Photography on Vinyl
25” x 17.5”, 2013
