Paradise (To All Those Who Did and Did Not Make it Across)
4waters, still. 30 min. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 2018.
Earth is all we have, what will we do with it? This series of films examines the concept of Paradise through the lenses of global blackness, sovereignty, environmentalism, economics, and belonging; asking what does Paradise look like, and who is it made for. This earth is precious to all of us, how do we acknowledge the difficult position of shouting our presence and continued survival from the rooftops while honoring our status as guests on land that was unjustly taken from others? These are questions that affect all of us. These films explore the anxiety of presence along with the desperation of finding a safe place to be present while considering questions of the nature of human presence and perspective.
Studio Sunday Activity
PERSONAL PARADISE DIORAMAS
If your internal mind manifested itself as a place you could live in, what would it look like? Create a miniature diorama out of art supplies and recycled materials to display your personal paradise. Be sure to view the film Triangle Trade, a collaborative work by Jerome Havre, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner above for inspiration for building your own ideal world.
What you need:
- Cardboard boxes (shoe, cracker, jewellery), found materials and objects (bubble wrap, fabric, cardboard, colored paper, etc), White and hot glue, tape, scissors .
What you do:
- Ask yourself some questions about your internal self: What do you care about? What do you like? What experiences shape you? What values are important to you? If your mind became an actual place, what would you see? This can be as realistic, or as abstract and bizarre as you like. Think about what interacting with and living in this place would be like.
- Find a box around the house that you can use for your diorama setting. If you like, you can cut off the front flaps and use them for extra cardboard, or leave them there to extend your diorama outwards, (it’s like the patio of your mind!).
- Use any crafting or art materials available to you to sculpt this internal landscape. Glue guns speed up the process, with adult supervision.
- Don’t forget to watch the related film to see all of your ideas synthesize and come together!
Interview with Elizabeth Webb
Our Curatorial Assistant Lillian O’Brien Davis sits down with Elizabeth M. Webb in this interview, entitled I Have my Origins in a Multitude: An Interview with Elizabeth M. Webb. The two discuss Webb’s film, For Paradise, which can be seen above.
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Austria and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She is Fall 2019 Visiting Faculty in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Triangle Trade Interview
In conjunction with the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s film program, Paradise (to all those who did and did not make it across), we are sharing an interview with three artists who created one of the films featured in our program, Triangle Trade (2017).
The interview with artists Cauleen Smith, Camille Turner and Jérôme Havre, originally commissioned by Gallery TPW in Toronto, ON in 2017 is facilitated by writer and editor Yaniya Lee.
The artists explore how they each bring aspects of their own practice; puppetry, performance and film together to create this collaborative work. The interview touches on questions of African diasporic relationship to land, the artists’ collaborative dynamic and peculiarities of using marionettes as protagonists.
“Community is the base module for survival…”
– Cauleen Smith
The subject matter and the nature of the artists’ collaboration articulate many themes that appear repeatedly across the rest of the film program. Each artist embodies Black identity differently due to their situation within different socio-cultural contexts. Camille, a Jamaican immigrant to Canada, Jerome a Parisian ex-patriate in Canada and Cauleen an African American who travelled to Canada as a visitor specifically to create this film. The situation of the puppets in the film, in three distinct landscapes made from cardboard and other found material form an archipelago of islands where the puppets exist and observe their surroundings.
The interview highlights the typical dis-connection that members of the African diaspora often feel to land and geography, with unclear relationships to the idea of a homeland. Cauleen Smith’s puppet lives on a volcanic island that could explode at any moment, reflecting the volatile political environment she finds herself in within the United States. Camille Turner’s puppet lives on an ethereal and icy island evocative of the iconic, stark arctic landscapes of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris. Jerome Havre’s puppet exists on an isolated sandy island from which he can observe the world, reminiscent of Havre’s experience navigating both a national French identity along with a racialized identity which distinguishes him as ‘Other.’
The title of the film, Triangle Trade refers to the Triangular Trade system, where slaves, crops and manufactured goods were transported between West Africa, the Caribbean and American colonies. The film reflects how each artist has dealt with the legacy of colonial racism which was the true product of this system and continues to persist today. The film’s narrative finds the specificity of its relationship to the “American Dream” and the realities of settler-colonial existence as a person of colour; for whom existence on all land is tempered by a feeling of loss, a feeling of being both at home and an alien everywhere.