Thic Pic, Michaela Bridgemohan
Familiar places, objects, images and scents can transport us to other times and versions of ourselves. In this way, our memories are held by the land and our embodied experiences within it. But how does this memory translocate across geographies? For diasporic peoples, where do our memories belong?
How does memory inform geography and provide an alternate way of knowing and imagining the world?
In embalmed funks, Michaela Bridgemohan draws on her inherited Afro-Caribbean cultural practices to explore this question, inviting viewers into this archive of intimate Black Canadian home life. This methodology is informed by generative and reciprocal forms of care—prioritizing self-sustenance, futurity and creative power. In this austere gallery space, everyday domestic items like silk pillowcases, end tables and wide-tooth combs are recontextualized—here, we are reverent and attentive: these objects are sacred. But this sacredness does not exist out of time and place; it is situated within Syilx and Caribbean lands and holds those relationships with their people and living things. Sculptures are infused with local plant life, while artistic methods incorporate practices of Afro-Caribbean care—oil is massaged into hair and wood; we make salves from the land to moisten our bodies; beeswax forms a comb. By conflating these practices of caring for the body with those of caring for the land, can memory take root here, too?
salve table (lotion for your consitution)
Bridgemohan responds to scholarly work by Canadian scholar Dr. Katherine McKittrick; Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, which explores how the practice of resistance to racial domination intensifies Black women’s relationship with land. Bringing attention to spatial acts as forms of poetic expression, resistance and naturalization. In this way, “understanding blackness has been twinned by the practice of placing blackness and rendering body-space integral to the production of space.” Dispossessed bodies and prairie scapes are not passive. Spatial domination is dismissed here, so actions become poetically expressive and remembered as home. The combination of materials, landscape photographs and performances are to “unfix” the one-dimensional perception of black women’s geographic positioning. Embalmed funks insist upon this, recognizing land as home, which insists on naming one’s self and self-history.
The objects of embalmed funks are representational, but their applications are abstracted: both artifacts of the everyday and relics of distant land/memory; a testament to Afro-Caribbean dispossession and a tribute to Syilx land; an act of cultural persistence and a spectre of what was once remembered.
Michaela Bridgemohan’s exhibition embalmed funks will be on view in the Main Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from March 15 - April 27 2024.
Michaela Bridgemohan is an interdisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who grew up in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, but now gratefully resides on Syilx territory, Kelowna, B.C. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia—Okanagan and received her BFA in Drawing (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017. Through her paternal Caribbean heritage, Bridgemohan's artistic research is driven to reinscribe new notions of multiplicity and multi-dimensionality within Black identity in Canada. She includes cultural ways of making as a legitimate form of artistic expression and creative power. Wood, Indigo and familial objects materialize these immaterial anecdotal memories—a corporeal shadow in the shape of domestic spaces, brown bodies and fertile terrain. Theoretical and contemporary writings on Caribbean-Canadian thought, Black Feminism, Hauntology, Relationality, Indigenous Knowledge and Land-based practices inform these conversations.
Bridgemohan’s art practice wouldn’t be possible without the gracious support of the British Columbia Arts Council, Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and Canada Council for the Arts, whose work has been exhibited across Canada and Australia. Exhibitions include but limited to Grunt Gallery-Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (Vancouver BC), Fort Gallery (Fort Langley BC), Lake Country Art Gallery (Lake Country, BC), Feminist Art Collective (Toronto ON), Diasporic Futurisms (Toronto ON), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton AB), Stride Gallery (Calgary AB), The Marion Nicoll Gallery (Calgary AB), Whitebox Gallery (Brisbane QLD) and Jugglers Art Space (Brisbane QLD).