Deanna Bowen

Cecily Nicholson

Join artist-in-residence Deanna Bowen in conversation with Vancouver-based poet, activist and community organizer Cecily Nicholson as they discuss intersecting concerns in their respective practices.

A detail of installation work by Deanna Bowen. On a table with two chairs, a rotary phone, a radio, newspaper, and a note are placed. 

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Deanna Bowen in conversation with Cecily Nicholson

Talk

Deanna Bowen’s solo exhibition, *A Harlem Nocturne*, comprises two separate strands of research following the artist’s family lineage in Canada. Her practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives and forgotten documents, Bowen employs a range of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into public visibility.

In the Alvin Balkind Gallery, a four-channel video installation presents footage from *On Trial The Long Doorway* (2017), which focuses on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby played a supporting role.

The B.C. Binning Gallery features works presenting a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Vancouver in 2017–18, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings and numerous personal and organizational archives. Each of these materials trace interconnected figures forming an integral part of Vancouver’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s to 1970s. As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony surrounded by societal and institutionalized racism, they were both invisible and hypervisible, variously admired, exoticized, surveilled, discriminated against and violently attacked. What these recovered documents ultimately reveal is the picture of a complex and varied Black community in Vancouver.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

Presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival. *On Trial The Long Doorway* was commissioned and produced through a partnership between the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and Mercer Union, Toronto. Production support was provided through a Media Arts residency at the Western Front, Vancouver. Additional support provided by Clark’s Audio Visual. The artist wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their support.


### Biography 

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship. Bowen makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, Bowen’s work has involved rigorous examination of her family lineage and their connections to the Black Prairie pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Creek Negroes and All-Black towns of Oklahoma, the extended Kentucky/Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including 2017 Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. She has exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto (2017); the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2015); McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton (2015 – 14) and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2013)

ProgramGuideSpring2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideDeannaBowen.pdf

An image depicting Benesh notation dance scores. The scores are white on a solid black background and resemble sheet music. “Farm Duet.” is written above the score on the top left.

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video on a monitor, a framed print, an overhead projector projecting a text document, a black & white painting, and choreographic notes in three lightboxes.

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video projected onto the white gallery wall, a TV monitor on a plinth, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a photograph, and a print of city subdivisions. 

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Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a TV monitor on a plinth, two framed prints, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a print of city subdivisions, a vitrine with an open book.

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A corner wall of a gallery space with a photograph and a print of city subdivisions hanging on each side of the wall. A vitrine with an open book sits to the right. 

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Four monitors are installed in a circle in a gallery. They are all on stands, with the screens facing inwards. Cords and black tape lines lay on the concrete floor. 

Talk

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