A Space Gallery Installation View
Installation view of "Fashion" Series at A Space
gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2007
Installation view (detail) of "Fashion" Series at
A Space gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2007
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Title: |
"Fleeting Face" |
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Dates: |
June15- July21, 2007 |
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Location: |
A Space Gallery |
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Toronto, Canada
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"My
real name is Sangita. And my pseudo name is Julia?
says [a call centre] representative in India. "Julia
Roberts happened to be my favorite actress, so I
just picked out Julia? “American movies are part of
an agent's training in how to sound all-American?
-
Out Of India, CBC's 60 Minutes, 2004
The title of this exhibition, Fleeting Face, implies
a glimpse at a disappearing identity. It is a group
show, which brings together six Canadian artists
that use the human face as a means of grappling with
racial, cultural and gender identity from personal,
as well as global perspectives. Sandra Brewster,
Erika Defreitas, Joyce Lau, Lee Ritian,
Fariba Samsami and Shiva Shoeybi deal with the
formation and deconstruction of identity through the
exploration of multi-racial blending, cross-cultural
immigration, mass media consumption, oppressive
rule, and rebellion.
As globalization theories of a single global culture
generate concern over the loss of national and
personal identity, Fleeting Face challenges us with
a variety of perspectives on identity issues. At a
time when certain identity politics are disputed,
considered ineffective and even naive, A Space
Gallery presents a timely and crucial dialogue on
these issues. In her book, Who’s Afraid of Identity
Politics?, Linda Martín Alcoff explains the
challenge perfectly; “To defend any version of
identity politics today is to swim upstream of
strong academic currents in feminist theory,
literary theory, and cultural studies?
In the sixties, oppression of race, gender and
sexuality spurred the civil rights movement. For two
decades, following the late eighties, this movement
merged into a more singular fight for minority
representation in media and literature. Certain
aspects of these movements are currently criticized
for being essentialist in that they create
monolithic definitions of existence. They run into
danger of creating identities that only belong to
specific groups such as ethnicity, gender and sexual
orientation, and implying that each of these groups
carries certain qualities and experiences only
unique to them.
More recently, activists and academics are
dismantling essentialist concepts. Postmodernists
argue that identity is a social construct and that a
particular Identity is varied since a certain group
in one society (such as women) differs from the same
group in another society. Postpositive realists,
like other structuralists, while allowing for
multiple individual existences, shift focus from
groups of people onto processes of combating power
structures.
The six artists in Fleeting Face dare to delve in a
variety of older and newer approaches to Identity.
They invite personal and global perspectives in an
attempt to rescue various identities from oppressed,
blurred, monolithic and fleeting states.
In Cool Pose, Brewster examines the African-American
tendency to wear invisible masks as a "silent
rebellion" and "form of resistance" (Richard Majors
and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose) against
feelings of oppression. She extends the cool
demeanour of black males, a posturing which
expresses distance, strength and control, to include
black females. Her intimate portraits draw the
viewer in close, while challenging him/her to break
through their blank protective gazes.
In a similar vein, Defreitas engages viewers in the
social tendencies that distance, as well as blur,
African-American people from the rest of society.
Her performance Pass-port, draws on her personal
experience of how easy it has been (due to her
appearance) to “pass?for various nationalities. The
artist asks participants to accept or decline her
for specific nationalities and finishes by pining
copies of any signed passports from participants
onto hand-drawn wall maps forming a metaphorical
global expression of her blurred reality.
Lau’s Cut-outs threaten to further obliterate
identities of people within their original iconic
images. The artist reinterprets iconic images
through stencils and decorative paper and explains
she is “inspired by the void in the extracting of
the image? While challenging preconceived notions
derived from the media, Lau’s body of work wrestles
with loss of identity.
Lee also deals with images of famous people. In his
Fashion Series, Lee uses clippings from a Chinese
newspaper to create checkerboards of faces made up
of stars in advertisements, public officials,
accident victims, and criminals under pursuit. The
faded yellowed faces of people that were in the
spotlight for a fleeting moment leave the viewer
with a feeling of loss and begs the question of who
they really are.
In Samsami’s Reframing, participants are shocked at
their newly constructed identities as they step out
of her photo booth with a photo of themselves
bearing a veil covering their hair. They instantly
wonder about the possibilities of being been born a
woman into traditional Muslim faith. In Reframing,
Samsami raises issues about power over female
sexuality and questions the constraining force of
traditional taboos. Her artwork also explores
concepts of exile, immigration, political boundaries
and conflicting cultural worlds.
Shoeybi’s uses her Iranian and Canadian passports to
demonstrate complexity in national identity in The
Passport. She gradually superimposes, both her
Iranian and Canadian passports to express acceptance
of new national identity as well as the reality of
identity being in constant flux. The Passport speaks
about the multi-faceted identity of immigrants and
multi-ethnic people.
In Fleeting Face, all six artists insist on Identity
as a currently relevant and crucial issue. Armed
with the language of visual art, they arouse
refreshing inspiration into the transitory state of
Identity Politics.
By
Director Teresa Ascencao
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