Palomitas Blancas, 1994

(Each uniform: 48 x 18 x 14 inches approx.)
(Each box: 48 x 18 x 6 inches)

Palomitas Blancas (Little White Doves) was produced in Argentina, after I received one of my first creation grants. The work is directly related to my experience of exile. It is probably one of the few pieces that speak in such an autobiographical manner bringing childhood memories and the experience of immigration together. Children wearing the white uniforms would be called in popular vernacular as “Little White Doves”.

The work is made of two sets of uniforms. On the floor a group of six uniforms made out of Kraft paper, life size, standing like in a vigil, in two rows. The uniforms are modeled after the white uniforms used by girls in the public education system, most of the time at the elementary level. I worked from the actual patterns to cut them out and machine sewn them like if I was working with a fabric.

On the wall, placed at eye level, there is a second set of uniforms encased on two acrylic boxes, housing one uniform each. There is powder graphite, inside at the bottom of the boxes, and fingerprints marks on the acrylic. Each box has an etched message on the surface, ‘Mira atras’ and ‘Al bajar’: this translates as ‘Look Behind’ and ‘When You Step Down’. This sign is found on the back door of public city buses to warn people to be careful of potential upcoming traffic; buses would not always stop close to the curve.

I use this sign to speak of history, of how as citizens we must look back continuously at the past if we want to understand our present and our future.

The work speaks of absence and of presence revealing different levels of meaning and of understanding of the experience of violence and immigration.

This work was produced following a series of events. On one hand there was a friend with access to a print shop right in the middle of the pandemic. Also, I had been working with dancers, on performance workshops and had brought fabrics for them to work with. Some of the fabric was stretchy, some was semi transparent, and I had gone to a seamstress to join them to create something the dancers could get inside and be able to move. And I had these images of my face from way back; images used on a performance that I thought could work for the prints.

So, we went ahead Stefan and I, and he had the semi transparent fabrics silkscreened with one particular image. I wanted the same image printed, to see how they worked in the different colors. Suddenly the work started to have a life of its own, and I realized I had to overlap the fabrics and voilà! the piece was there. By overlapping the fabrics it created a depth in the image, and it became more than I had planned at the beginning. I ended adding fishing lines to the exterior fabric. The work hangs now at home, in the space facing the stairs to the basement: it has found its place.

I decided to use the words from a Talking Head song as the title.

I want to thank Stefan Hoffmann (printing) and Jennifer Drysdale (photography) for their work.

Mother Tongue/ Lengua Madre, 1991

I produced Mother Tongue 30 years ago (!), towards the end of my MFA at Concordia University. At the time my friend KF and I had created a dark room out of a closet in the Bourgeois building. Under strange administrative reasons during those years, being part of an open graduate program that had no link to an undergraduate one, left us unable to use the darkroom in the VA building, or any other shop for that matter. So, we made our own.

In retrospect it probably was very toxic, and I don’t remember if we used masks, on top I started using ‘liquid light’ on lead, doubling the toxic possibilities probably! KF reminded me a while ago that my experience working in the photo lab at OCAD in Toronto came in handy. I knew what to buy and to how to mix the chemicals for developing and printing black and white.
Mother Tongue is made out of a series of approx. 20 lead panels seven by five inches and about ¼ of an inch thick. As I mentioned, I used liquid light (a chemical that makes any surface light sensitive) to develop black and white photographic images on top of the lead. These panels would sit on wooden ledges; the configuration would vary depending on where it was installed.

The images in the lead pieces are of my face with the eyes close, of my face with the eyes open, of my tongue and of my thumbprint: all elements to confirm identity. The photographic images sat very unevenly on the surface of the lead creating differences with each image.

This work was exhibited at Articule, in Montreal in a group show where three curators had chosen three artists of the community. It travelled to AKA’Artist Centre in Saskatoon as part of a show I had titled ‘Heavy Stitching’, and my friend DB took the work to Mexico along side other works from Montreal artists. Somehow some of the pieces have been ‘lost’, I don’t know how that happened, but I was neglectful to check that they were all there every time the work came back from its travels.

I am particularly found of the work as I think it is one of the strongest works where I combined my feelings of exile tied to my identity as an artist and a woman.

Le boxeur se prépare, ses vêtements attendent dans la salle/
The boxer gets ready, his clothes wait in the room, 1999.
Documentation of this piece can be found in the site under past works, but I felt I wanted to bring this installation to the forefront. It is a work that has stayed with me after all of these years.
François (my husband) and I had at that point been in Cameroon for at least for one year. We had come to central Africa with a contract Francois had obtained with Oxfam Quebec. I was unable to do the same, but I wanted to stay busy and useful. I did volunteer work teaching at two different institutions, a wonderful experience that helped me improve my French on the way.
At the same time, it was important for me to connect with local artists. I reached out to the different art institutions and that included Espace Doual’art, in the city of Douala. Princes Marylin Douala and the late Didier Schaub speared headed Doual’art, a center of the arts, education and communication that had already made a big impact on the city of Douala for the better, and it continues to do so. At one point Doual’art offered me the possibility of presenting my work. Our daughter had already been born, and I produced the whole installation in her company.
The work was inspired by an image of a boxer on a matchbox easily found in the 90’s in Cameroon. The installation is made out of six elements. There are two images of the boxer; one in imitation gold leaf and the second one is a cut out figure at the entrance of the gallery. The other four elements are objects that make direct reference to the boxer’s clothing: a shoe, a boot, a glove and shorts. Every piece in the installation has its own particularity and presence, but each is somehow dysfunctional.
I wanted to use materials easily found in African markets: recycled rubber inner tubing which is used to tied things up, white sugar, egg-shells coming from the local egg production, false hair from the many hairdressing saloons and hand made cut gravel. Ebolowa, the city where we lived, has about 40,000 inhabitants and is located about 1h30h from the capital of Yaounde (and 3 hours from Douala). Outside of the city center, by specific rock sediment, we had encounter adults and children spending their days under a small hut, chipping on the gravel rock with small hammers. They will sell their work to local construction companies.
The activity of making gravel by hand had made an impression on me, and I wanted to use their work in one of the pieces. I bought a few pails of the gravel to build the shorts of the boxer, and then I used imitation gold leaf to cover its exterior. It is the only piece that I placed on a pedestal. All the other works were placed on the floor.
The boot was made of long rubbers pieces that occupied a large space on the floor ending on the actual boot, built by knitting the rubber the rubber pieces, and it is about three feet in length.
The shoe (standard size 10 man) is made of sugar cubes glued together, sitting on a serving tray with water around it.
Further in the gallery, there was a large object close to three feet in length made out of eggshells, with long pieces of dark false hair. It was not obvious but the eggshell object was meant to be one of the boxer’s gloves, with false hair at the end.
As I mentioned before there was an image of the boxer on the wall in front of the installation of about 12 inches in height made out of imitation gold leaf. And as one entered the installation I had hang a long piece of tracing paper and cut out the image of the boxer also of about 12 inches in height.
The day after the opening of the show, the gallery organized a discussion around the work in the presence of the public and many artists of the community. For me at the time, it was an invaluable opportunity to make a deeper connection with local artists; an enriching experience overall.
Every three years or so, since 2007 Doual’art has organized SUD the Salon Urbain de Douala. I was honoured to participate in 2010 with two different shows: an installation at the gallery in January of that year, and then a video projection out side the gallery in December 2010 in the middle of the actual Salon and the other works being presented.

The Weight of a Nation is a piece that came to fruition during a particular time when I found myself in a shared, but empty and open studio with clean wooden floors and lots of light. The work was produced in part, as the photographs have yet to be printed in the format desired. The piece never found an exhibition space. This is an installation made out of three elements presented simultaneously.
The first element is a series of photographs that I took of myself with my trusted 35 mm Pentax camera and a long shutter release. In the pictures, I am dressed with a long black dress and black suede shoes. The images are ‘performatic’ and show me interacting with a map of Argentina made out of lead.
The second element is the actual map of about one inch in thickness and four feet in length: soft lead and pliable (and probably toxic, in retrospect).
The third element is a video of me carrying the map on my back and walking back and forth in front of a white wall.
The actual installation presents on one hand the life size prints pinned on the walls of the space. In the center of the space is the lead map placed on the floor, and lastly on the wall opposite to the entrance of the space, the audience sees the video projected on a loop.
As an immigrant to this country from the age of eighteen onwards I felt then, and maybe now too, the ‘weight’ of my country of origin in a literal way. The photographs show a love affair relationship that is simultaneously painful, funny, sexy and heavy to carry. And carrying it I do as an immigrant, the country of my birth is always present in a visceral way. The work is about memory, emigration and longing.