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These past five years I have specialized and constructed much of my practice within photography, video, and other digital media. Through experimentation with digital and analogue techniques of abstraction, my work explores topics centered around mindfulness and self-image, as they pertain to our increasingly digital, yet physically fragile society. However, this year, as evidenced by my works presented in Manifold, my practice has undergone a conceptual and material shift as explorations of performance and sculpture have become my primary focus. 
 
My second piece in Manifold is a sculpture titled Forced Depth. The 3D printed sculpture of the phrase “Sorry” toys with the idea of the cheap repetitive apology that loses significance when not reinforced by action. Over the last near decade of my life, I have observed how unlearning and reconciliation can feel uncomfortable. Struggling to face this, Forced Depth is a sculpture that encapsulates the outsourcing of this inaction to a machine, highlighting the avoidance of reconciliation that occurs when our apologies aren’t backed by change. The length of the sculpture, indicative of the number of printed apologies, is an attempt at creating distance between the accuser and the accused.  
 
Moving forward I hope to form more concise connections between this apologetic sculpture and our colonial state – one that’s notorious for hollow apologies and vacant promises of reconciliation.

My practice involves the investigation of themes relating to racial and gender identity, mental health, as well as the dissection of semiotics in domestic spaces. I often use my practice as a way to process the world around me as well as a medium to investigate introspectively. Because I approach the content of my practice in such a personal way, I often perform as a subject across many pictorial mediums, exploring my external and internal identity through the depiction of my own body in my work. With a background in improvisational performance, my work often contains humorous undertones and pays particular consideration to the viewer’s potential interaction with my chosen media. The work I produce frequently contains an amalgam of disciplines, primarily sculpture, photography, and printmaking techniques, to explore these topics.  

Within the process of collaborating and working so closely with a friend this semester, I also felt inclined to create work that I had complete ownership of. I come from a family where the collection and gathering of supplies was a strategy used to protect us from the disadvantages of having a low income, stacks of stuff that wavered between defence and imparement. I have confronted these material ethics and have incorporated a lot of them into my art practice, finding most of my supplies in places where their value, status or desirability has shifted towards waste/refuse. This painting, titled Lost, was created with these close personal connections in mind, both materially and conceptually. Repurposing a box taken from a domestic context, I explore the tension between the information shared and withheld between the members of my immediate family, and the distress our presence and absence in each other’s lives can exert on our wellbeing. 

Moving forward I hope to continue to use my practice to allow me to step outside of myself and view the world, and my interactions with it, through a creative and inquisitive lens.

We live in fast paced world where we rarely take the time to slow down and truly appreciate the incredible things that are in front of us. Animation is something that I believe isn’t given enough credit and should be valued for every second that is shown on our screens. I personally a very deep admiration and appreciation for the Japanese anime style, particularly of the 90s. The simplistic use of shape, colour blocking, and line work come together in both harmony and chaos to create visuals that hold sophisticated stories within them. Therefore, I love to give these stories, characters and themes the care of bringing them into the world of painting since every frame in any anime is screaming out to become a part of the typical fine art world that is found in institutions. Bringing the classical and contemporary digital art forms together. What does a freeze frame from an animated clip say to the viewer outside its original context? What details within the animation were sacrificed or where were corners cut to make the process easier for the animator that can now be captured eternally on canvas? How does the image read loping the even, smooth blocks of colour, now replaced by brush work? These are questions I ask myself while creating and ones that I hope viewers will ponder as well. 

Anime also has a special place in my heart because it was the main source of entertainment that I remember having access to after my family immigrated to Canada from Jamaica. I was intrigued by these characters and worlds that I could submerge myself in through the brightly coloured pixels gleaming from my television. I used these stories to explore my identity and desires without the need of vocalizing or acting upon them, making them real. I could run away from home, state my mind on religion, harm my enemies or lose my virginity, all without having to move away from the screen. Honestly, with muscular men like Inuyasha and Goku in my life from such a young age, how could I not be gay? The drawings are the wall are not only to credit my linear painting style and importance of my drawing practice that is ultimately covered by my painting practice (literally); but they are to act as reminders, guardians of my childhood and symbols of who I am today.

These works are a physical expression of me utilizing these properties to address conflicts within myself that relate to sexual power, fetishization of my race, racial inequality, and relationship with religion, particularly within the LGBTQ2IA+ community. The intervention of the subtitles act as my tools to reconstruct the context of the image that I’ve deconstructed from its original source. The largest painting, titled ‘Perfect Blue’, being the focus of the overall collection of works, plays deeply into sexual power. At first the selected text may act as merely shock value for some; however, I’ve always used humour and erotic subject matter to strip my viewers wall of expectation of fine art and hold them where they need to be to see the intention and purpose of the combined themes, text and or visuals. It is easiest to conclude that the text “I’m gonna cum on your face” is being stated to the figure and that act will be done whether she wants it or not. What I would hope is that we would entertain the thought that perhaps she is the one about to cum on someone else’s face. With the “I’m about to cum” expression she has I would think that would be obvious. What preconceived biases cause us to believe that a person lacks dominance and what happens when those who appear to lack dominance, claim it unapologetically? This work is the perfect outlet for me to address my personal development and conflicts, while also sprinkling in my own sense of humor, all within visuals that I find to be stereotypically or ironically beautiful.

Mei Lein Harrison and Emil White were inspired to collaborate having observed their propensity to aid each other in the creation of their respective individual work in the past, as well as possesing a desire to employ their different perspectives in regards to gender dynamics, a topic of sustained interest for them both. They utilize these differing perspectives –  Emil as a cis white man and myself as a coloured, mixed-race, asexual, genderqueer person – to assess past experiences with gender and dynamics of power and control they’d observed in domestic settings. This work has also functioned as a way to reflect on the shift that has occurred in the expression of these values from the each artists’ parents’ generation to their own. The creative exploration of these topics culminated, to some extent, in the installation of the work in Zavitz gallery in mid-November, an exhibition titled help help help. They used diverse aesthetic strategies to aid in the telling of a performed narrative, documenting these gestures in both their houses, as well as the street that connects these personal domestic spaces. Curating vignettes from a collection of lived experiences, they use a combination of subtle and grand, almost comical, gestures to communicate the dance around the line that resides between affection and control. The work put into the performance and the themes played upon in the video are reflected in a more tangible way in Mei Lein and Emil’s soft sculpture. The artists made a decision to only use found materials to fabricate this abstraction of the feminine form, allowing associations with these materials from previous owners, and the worn qualities, to aid in the dissection of the approach to the feminine body as an object for servitude and comfort. This work involved both the construction of parts of the body as well as the violence subjected to it in its display, particularly as all the pieces were hand-stitched onto the mattress.

Sarah Bryant uses found objects and fiber yarns to explore Western gender roles, performance, and queering of gender norms. Sarah builds sculptural pieces to question gender-coding of objects and see what becomes of object associations by skewing their function and environment. Fiber arts have historically been viewed as a feminine-coded; soft, “pretty”, and lesser skilled. Femineity or prettiness is also weaponized as a weakness or deficit. Sarah uses traditional crochet techniques and wrapping to cover or decontextualize typically masculine-coded objects. Softening hard things allows Sarah to probe feelings and sensations related to experiences in the real world as a female presenting human at work, at home, and in shared public spaces. Sarah aims to create tension by twisting or reversing accepted functions of objects to play with performative aspects of gender norms in a safe manner, highlight absurdity, neutralize gendered objects, and subtly touch on some elements of violence inherent in the merging of these materials.

I am a long-time Photoshop avoider and recently a mushroom forager. I did not anticipate the happenstance merging of these domains, nor the number of parallels and metaphors shared between them.
 
My ‘artistic practice’ always involves fumbling. I spawn an idea that incessantly rattles around my skull until I find a road to render it tangible- a process which frequently involves layers of messing up and incidental discoveries. This project was a demonstrable instance of erroring my way towards something grander than my rattling.  
 
I sought to collect mushrooms and make spore prints from their underside, later photographing the spore prints to preserve their configurations. In attempting to render the background of my spore photographs a simple black, I discovered Photoshop’s Content-Aware-Fill Filter and accidently applied data from the spore print towards the negative space surrounding them. This resulted in ethereal, dendric trails of Artificial-Intelligence generated pixels attempting to augment the data from my spore. Yeah, my jaw was on the floor.
 
There exists a rather magical correspondence between Content Aware Fill’s A.I. trajectories and trails made by mycelium (the actual vegetative part of the fungus that mushrooms grow from and spores initiate). Namely- their shared awareness and methods of growth. 
 
For mycelium to produce from spores- kickstarting the web structures of fungus- there must be a minimum of two spores to spur reproduction. Content Aware Fill’s A.I. needs a minimum of two pixels to spur its function; one pixel for the source of visual data you’re drawing from, and one towards which you’re directing its use. Mycelium grows microscopically, one cell at a time, wriggling through the organic matter of its surroundings. Content Aware Filladdresses its movement through an image by analyzing the landscape; one pixel at a time. 
 
In both of these processes, they exhibit a degree of intelligence, insofar as each examine their environment and make informed adjustments regarding how to most fruitfully move through it. Mycelium, aimed at growth in order to persevere opportunities for reproduction, and the A.I. interested in maintaining the composition’s integrity by spawning pixels as it deems most beneficial. I know, pretty meta, right?
 
The analogy between these two entities is not only notable in their congruency to one another, but moreover for their resemblance of microcosmic-to-macrocosmic structures found within the universe at large. The manner in whichinteractions can convert simple inputs into diverse, intelligible outputs- whether that be molecular, organismal, computational, astronomical, or metaphysical- ultimately all echo one another. Each reaching out into negative space and making decisions on how to approach its unknown. 
 
These compositions contain tiny universes expressing their rules, their conduits, of survival and expansion. I am but a gobsmacked conductor, writing an artist statement as though I made these and they did not make me. 

My current practice is deeply influenced by my heritage and investigates themes of cultural identity, acculturation, and intragroup marginalization through the processes of learning and unlearning. As a bi-racial individual of partial Middle Eastern descent and a first generation Canadian, my work evokes an imagined space of my homeland, Palestine. Growing up in an excessively white-dominated society and as one of the very few coloured children in my school, I was exposed to national issues of ethnic identity at a young age. At home I was shielded from the perpetual and undisputed tragedies of Palestinian people, and took on the accultural attitude and behaviours of my mother and her siblings, who immigrated to Canada as very young children. Because of my experiences as a child I tended to lean into my “white-ness” and separated myself from my ethnic origins. Relative to my current studio practice, the methodology of unlearning requires me to step outside of and re-frame the mental paradigm influenced by cultural conditioning. I set into motion my ideas through interdisciplinary experimentation with mediums such as video performance, installation, and photography, and am drawn to the use of culturally-rich material such as visual language and textiles to transcend the boundaries of identity and reflect a multicultural perspective. Recent works incorporate Arabic script and traditional fabric as catalysts in connecting to my cultural roots. In the 2021 exhibition Manifold, my piece “I am Palestinian” aims to share the intensely personable process of discovering and absorbing my Middle Eastern and Palestinian heritage. The repetitive action of writing in arabic script as well as the motion blur of the print portray a sense of urgency in reconstructing my identity. The connection between my identity and skin colour is emphasized through the lack of colour present in the piece exclusive of my skin. In the practice of educating myself and fostering a more diverse modality of thinking, I am also interested in creating space for viewers to locate inherent and unconscious perception biases and recognize the potential for unlearning and relearning. Through these explorations as an artist and individual I am seeking to continue further uncovering my ethnic roots and ultimately reclaiming my identity.