1995/99
(un)veilings / back pain
Old Market Square and the Floating Gallery, Winnipeg,
Manitoba
and postcards freely distributed.
The first appearance of these images was as temporary outdoor photographic installation consisting of five black and white photographic and glass etched panels each 36" x 50" approximately installed in earth mounds in the ground at the Old Market Square under the auspices of Light Year: A Festival of Photographies sponsored by the Floating Gallery: Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In both the first and second versions text accompanied the images. In the first instance the text was sandblasted onto tempered glass plates which were installed over top of the black and white photographic images laid into the ground.
|
|
who
controls the silence? somehow I learned to separate the experience from the feeling * this way I wouldn't be present when the bad stuff happened I'm
still trying to put
living with the memories * the what truths must I tell my children?
when I was little, my father told me I promised I wouldn't do that to my daughter |
Four years later I revisited the work and created a set of five postcards as part of my involvement with Public Art as Social Intervention: But now I have to speak - Testimonies of trauma, resilience, and change. This was a three part project which I initiated and co-organized with Dr. Lauren Lerner and p.k. Langshaw which included a symposium, a series of artistic interventions
and exhibitions and a website. Black and white photographic images of my children's backs are reproduced on the front of the card. On the top left hand corner of reverse side are short phrases referring to the relationship between back pain and the cycle of family violence, in particular child abuse, as a consequence of cultural and ethnic traumas. The work is intended to be as much a testimony, a verbal and visual action of resistance, as an intervention in the repetitious cycle -- not merely a witness to child abuse as a consequence of cultural oppression, but a participant in its cessation.
» back
pain
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http://hybrid.concordia.ca/dart_projects/publicart