[Summer 2023]

By Neil Price

Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto
03.12.2022 — 14.01.2023

[Excerpt]

Black feminists have long been concerned with what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as “controlling images.” They have consistently pointed out (and called out) ways in which such images have hamper and harm Black women’s struggle for freedom by reducing their experiences to racialized and gendered tropes rooted in violent histories. In response, Black feminists and artists have interrogated, critiqued, and theorized how the Black woman’s body has been utilized as a site for fantasy, excess, pleasure, and subjection through images. Recovering Black women from what Jennifer C. Nash describes as an “archive of pain” has therefore been one of the major pursuits of Black feminists and artists.

In Together/Apart, artists Rebecca Bair and Karice Mitchell contribute to this tradition with an intriguing presentation of abstract photographic images that provide the viewer with varied points and vistas from which to reimagine Black women’s bodies, desires, and experiences. According to the exhibition text, Bair and Mitchell are interested in exploring what it means to refuse to “give away the image as a whole” while opening possibilities for “regenerative” interpretation…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Rebecca Bair and Karice Mitchell, Together/Apart – Neil Price ]