Backra
Bluid
April 26 – May 17, 2014
Opening reception: Saturday, April 26, 2014,
3:00pm to 6:00pm
1520 Queen
Street W
Toronto,
Canada
From generalhardware.ca:
In Backra Bluid, Brooklyn-based
photographer Stacey Tyrell portrays herself as a white woman by altering her
skin color and making subtle tweaks to her features. Backra is archaic Caribbean slang of West African origin that means
“white person.” Bluid is the Scotch
word for blood, as well as for kin. In this series Tyrell, draws on her own
family history – archaic and ongoing, Scottish and Caribbean – to explore how
identities complicate and overlap. Critical of the dualism inherent in
Eurocentric constructs of Whiteness and Blackness, Tyrell’s work suggests that
most people in post-colonial societies are not easily categorized. Developed
through fictitious avatars and dramatic sets, her approach privileges
performance and theatricality.
Tyrell
studied photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 2012, she was
chosen by Magenta Foundation’s Flash
Forward as a top emerging Canadian photographer. Her work has appeared in
exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian Museum for Immigration at
Pier 21, and at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY. Tyrell’s images
are included in the collections of Heritage Canada and Montreal Arts
Interculturels and have been published in magazines such as Canadian Art, ARC, Prefix Photo, Applied Arts and the book Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of
Contemporary Caribbean Photographers.
Backra
Bluid is a featured
exhibition in conjunction with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
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