ODE to a FERVENT SUN

Red Head Gallery, Toronto. April 24 to May 18, 2024.

Opening Reception: May 3rd, 5:30-7:30pm

Performance by Sara Porter, Dance Artist: May 10th at 7pm, & May 11th at 3pm and 4pm

Poetry and Song: May 16th, 7pm. Poets: Kelley Aitken, Jim Nason, Laboni Islam, Maureen Hynes, Maureen Scott Harris, Dilys Leman, nancy viva davis halifax. Vocalist: Heidi Breier

Ode to a Fervent Sun pays homage to the enticing but fraught relationship of our skin with the sun. An ever-present necessity for life, the sun is the source for biological processes, the seasons, ocean currents, ecology, and our warming climate. The sun is omnipresent in all the ways we navigate the complexities of our lives. Through installations, photography, and mixed media artworks, I examine and query that relationship.

Arriving as an adolescent on Grand Bahama Island in 1968, I experienced the delights and anxieties of a scorching tropical sun. The exhibition is a visual memoir of the six years I lived there, drawing on embodied memories and objects of the past. In one installation I recall the pleasures of hours spent on a beach slathered in oil. Another artwork, a radiating sun composed of ‘paper dolls’, confronts the norms and expectations for a young woman living in a sun-obsessed society – seeking the perfect tan and the perfect bikini for the perfect body.

My past artworks have often explored our skin—the physical boundary and canvas where individual memories are etched and embedded. The anthropologist Nina Jablonski observes that ‘our skin mediates the most important transactions of our lives. Skin is key to our biology, our sensory experiences, our information gathering, and our relationships with others.’ For Ode to a Fervent Sun, I incorporate microscopic images of my skin to amplify the meditative and connective aspect of the dermis that encases each of us and connects us to the wider world. As we relocate out of the sun and into the shade, our porous skin will continue to protect us while also recording the trauma of climate change. As literary scholar Steven Connor states, ‘The skin always takes the body with it.’ And our memories and fears of the sun in today’s slowly burning world.

Contact Photography Festival here Red Head Gallery here Canadian Art Hop here