Transgressive Passages
Transgressive Passages is a visual art project that investigates the intersections between Queer and Trans becoming and diasporic lineage. The project will culminate in a series of artworks that speak to my experience, as a Queer person, in multiple LGBTQIA2S+ communities across North America and Australia and how these relationships entangle with my diasporic Caribbean identity.
I participated in the Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s (RMG) RBC Artist Residency between June 17 and September 29, 2024. The residency was an opportunity for me to connect with, photograph, and collect audio recordings from people of the Queer Caribbean diaspora across the Durham and Greater Toronto Area regions. The subjects of the photographic series, Transmission, were adorned with hand dyed textiles that abstractly referenced each of their relationships to culture and folklore to reimagine the Queer Caribbean diaspora as powerful agents of resilience and hope. The RMG residency culminated in a solo exhibition which showcased the photographs, textiles, and performance I produced during the residency.
I developed a forty minute live performance for the 7a*11D International Performance Festival. I was invited by the curatorial collective to produce and perform a new work during the festival in October 2024. The audio recordings collected during the RMG residency were used to construct a sound composition for the performance, Transference, produced in collaboration with Markham-based Visual and Sonic artist, James Knott. Transference encompassed my body traversing between containers of water that gradually shrink as I move between them. I begin inside a rain-water collection barrel, swirling my body through the saltwater that fills the container so the sounds interact with the sound composition. With each movement between containers, my body begins to overtake the surface area of the steel drum and the mixing bowl, displacing the saltwater within. The sounds blend my own field recordings from Trinidad and Tobago, collaboratively constructed experimental steel pan recordings, and a choir of sounds collected from Queer and Trans loved ones between Toronto, Texas (US), and Melbourne (Australia). The performance serves as a bridge between queer and Caribbean lineages.
The performance containers and sound composition from Transference remained installed and looping in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
Both artworks, Transmission and Transference, in this series are intended to be extensions of one another–entangled through material and metaphor. They investigate and experiment with the complexities and agency in hyphenated identities.
The RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program is generously sponsored by the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
Transgressive Passages was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts for and Transference was developed with the assistance of 7A*11D International Festival of Performance Art.