July - October, 2023
We are thrilled to announce the upcoming exhibition by Gordon Shadrach at the Embassy of Canada to the United States, Washington. Reposition examines how we look at Black history in North America. It encourages viewers to consider what the promise of freedom looked like to formerly enslaved people, the systems that were put in place to prohibit that freedom and the often ignored history that informs the present and the direction of the future.
The mythology of “the North'' being a safe haven for formerly enslaved people permeates to this day. Canada has been seen as a culturally temperate country where issues around race and culture were scrubbed away with a brush of misguided interpretations and good intentions of multiculturalism. Over time, Canada became known for welcoming newcomers from all around the world and embracing the differences that often divide others. The cracks in the multiculturalism facade became more and more apparent and were pushed wide open as people demanded change that truly represented equitable practices for all. To understand what it is to be Black in Canada, is to understand Canadian History.
Canada played an important role in the abolition of slavery. Over 30 000 people sought freedom in Canada during the last decades of slavery. The Black Loyalists were formerly enslaved people who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary war with the promise of freedom and being settled in Nova Scotia. In 1851, The North American Convention of Colored Freemen, an abolition convention, was hosted for 3 days at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto.
Reposition looks at these historic moments through a conceptual lens. The exhibition looks at a reimagined past where the systemic barriers that marginalized segments of society and prohibited wealth and limited the extensions of bloodlines did not take hold. The roots of this journey begins with portraits of Black Loyalists dressed in their redcoat uniforms anachronistically paired with basketball jerseys or overly-decorated to encourage us to question the ways success is measured in our culture. The portraits of Victorian and Edwardian sitters are presented with red lines running through the paintings to remind us of practices in North America that were put in place as barriers to success and development.
