Sandra Brewster, Untitled, 2015-2016 [Image source]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I briefly wrote about Sandra Brewster in 2019. I think I may have found her images, and her site, through one of the art gallery (Facebook?) postings.
Nonetheless, I didn't transfer the post to my regular Reclaiming Beauty site. I thought it was a strange perspective of a black woman artist, but couldn't analyze it. I wrote: "It's extraordinary that a black woman would depict herself in this manner." I was thinking in terms of physical presentation, where the photo is not only blurred, but damaged and torn.
Brewster's website (quoting an Art Gallery of Ontario piece) has this:
“In her Blur series, Sandra Brewster explores layered experiences of identity — ones that may bridge relationships to Canada and elsewhere, as well as to the present and the past. The artist directs her subjects to move while she takes their picture. Then, using a gel medium, she transfers her image to a new surface, capturing changes in the creases and tears and empty spaces where ink does not adhere. These layered works capture the effect of existing in a state that defies easy categorization. They evoke the self in motion, embodying time and space, and channeling cultures and stories passed down from generation to generation.”
Well, I think it is related to the post I just put up on Beshir and MacDonell, where artists are now aggressively going for a "spiritual" (I call it as it an occult) dimension.
Below is the post on Brewster, who is getting a "heads up" by the Ryerson Image Centre's Facebook page, and curator of the gallery, Gaelle Morel, who came to the RIC via France, and is returning to her native country to curate an exhibition by Brewester, at the historic city of Arles, where Van Gogh painted some of his iconic paintings (disclosure: I am no fan of Van Gogh, but his paintings stretch miles ahead of Brewester's "photographs."). This upcoming exhibition at Arles is presented thus:
Brewster demande à ses sujets de bouger volontairement au moment de la prise de vue, le flou permettant ainsi d’évoquer des identités à la fois complexes et fluides.Bresster asks her subjects to move voluntarily (as they wish) at the moment of taking the picture, the blur allowing thus to evoke identities that are at times complex and fluid. [My translation].
So there's that word again, "evoke." Thus, Brewster enters that "other side," through the "voluntary" bodily movement of her subjects, and whose "in between" spaces she photographs. She is attempting to catch their "spirits."
Gaelle Morel, Juror for the 2022 Scotia Bank Photography Exhibition.
Morel, is curating an upcoming exhibition at the RIC on "Ward 81, a high security, locked psychiatry facility for women" by Mary Ellen Marks. Another, with a guest curator is titled: The Mind's Eye: The Psychic Photographs of Ted Serios.
What better group than the mad, the already mad, to glean psychic insight on how to "go to the other side."
Ted Serios, [Hotel and palm trees], March 6, 1965 [Image source]