still, unfolding
Abstract
Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations that immigrant artists provide an insider role to a culture. Meanings, practices, and memories are re-inscribed in the diaspora; my practice recognizes the everyday negotiation between resistance and surrender to the colonial through material considerations. Concepts of aesthetic fragmentation and the value of found materials explored in my artistic practice through collage are informed by memory work and trauma theory to emphasize the continuous state of arrival for nomadic people.