From the moment of birth, hair takes on multi-faceted meanings. Rooted within storytelling by families and communities, the politics of hair have been both intimately personal and profoundly social. Hair carries diverse cultural narratives that are usually shared through identity and gender. For example, the beauty one sees in loosely coiled curls or a tight braid are both evocative and subjective, not only in the presentation but how hair is communicated to the world.

Artists from across Canada—including Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour—offer reflections on how hair embodies the importance of culture.

Deeply meaningful relationships with hair involve intergenerational acts of oiling, braiding, covering/uncovering, and grooming that assist with giving meaning to traditions. Just as much as there are underlying tensions within the cultural histories inherent to these practices, so too do they influence ongoing forms of struggle. For instance, cutting a strand of hair became an act of resistance, igniting an international women’s movement in Iran to confront histories of oppression. The accoutrements of hair such as hijabs and turbans have been politically charged with public bans in some countries. This has forced people to confront a loss of deeply held beliefs, requiring them to assimilate to that society. In this exhibition, artists employ compelling storytelling that express connections intertwined with familial teachings and their own informed
experiences.

There will be a panel discussion with exhibiting artists Becky Bair, Wally Dion, and Claire Yow, with assistant curator Suvi Bains, and a poetry performance by Natasha Kianipour for the Winter Opening and Panel Discussion on Feb. 9. A film screening with community partner The Black Arts Centre will happen on Feb. 21. Conversations and Film Screening: Roots of Love takes place on Mar. 2.

Artists: Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour

Curator: Suvi Bains
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery
Community Partner: The Black Arts Centre

Where the Light Meets My Shoulder is a solo exhibition of recent work by interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Bair. Using her camera, ephemeral materials like shea butter and sunlight, and improvised movement to create her art, Bair builds her work on a foundation of play. While primarily working with photography, Bair uses a multitude of mediums to expand the possibilities of representation. Over the past five years, the artist has developed a style that reflects her experience as a Black woman living on Turtle Island. Her work upends how Blackness is often (mis)represented and honours the diverse, plural experiences of people of African descent. She tenderly gathers symbols of Blackness that are specific to her as an individual, all of which are “manifestations of deep love and resilience that have culminated in who I am today, and who I will be tomorrow.”  

Using recurring imagery of her coily hair, the sun, shadows and circles, Bair plays with abstraction to decide what can be seen and what is withheld. For the artist, hair is a site for intense connection, tended to by family as well as community members. In Portal (n.1 and n.2) (2022), the artist captures and expands details of her hair, printed as large-scale photographs on swaths of fabric that physically obstruct the gallery space, while the imagery – at this immense size – becomes abstracted. Representations of Blackness hold infinite possibility, yet the irreversible damage of colonialism persists. As a way to resist the white gaze and co-opting of Black representation, the artist blurs, obstructs and redacts images to push back against the oppressive impacts of systemic anti-Black racism. Playing with abstraction, she uses her body as her main subject but reveals only hints of herself, such as the shape of her shoulder or the outline of curls. By intentionally creating visual barriers between audiences and her content, Bair highlights how what is visible and what is not are equally important, and each asks something different of the viewer. The softness of a shadow and the silhouette of a curl of hair hold boundless possibilities that cannot be contained. 

New Forms: that which constitutes (critical) matter foregrounds the relationship between material, making, representation, interpretation, radical aesthetic, regeneration, and intellectual imaginings. The exhibition centers alternative forms of art-making and conceptual practices that subvert perception, revealing the undercurrents of historical discourse, as it endeavors to transform or modify materials from artists’ environment to concepts and substances that ground them. By creating outside the limitations of representational “accuracy,” these cross-disciplinary practices turn to the potentiality of abstract or conceptual approaches in materializing Black life, building something that intentionally occupies space, and positions the act of worldmaking futures within the artists’ hands. Grounded by Samara Apanke and Huey Copeland’s articulation of the “mattering of blackness itself” as a means of employing opacity, fluidity, and historicization through conceptual and material choices, Rebecca Bair, Shaurie Bidot, eva birhanu, Charles Campbell, Kim Dacres, Chantal Gibson, Chiedza Pasipandoya, and Jan Wade work across sculpture, textile, painting, mixed media, and found object, emerging a collective yet distinct reading of aesthetic autonomy and Black inhabitation. The exhibit examines form as a paradigm through which epistemologies are unraveled, renegotiated and rearticulated. How might practices that reach beyond the constraints of figurative, socio-political and cultural recognition express new meanings and new inquiries into the conditions that inform Black experiences? What constitutes the matter of Black life?

In partnership with Capture Photography Festival, the City of New Westminster commissioned a temporary installation for the glass façade of  Anvil Centre. 

Situated on the façade of the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, Rebecca Bair's site-specific installation, Curl Mapped, tackles the complex, colonial history of archives to represent that which is absent: traces of Black settlers in this region. Bair spent significant time in the city archives, housed in Anvil Centre, poring over the leather-bound ledgers, reading the handwritten notes, and examining the photographs therein only to discover a gap - what she describes as "a ghost in the space." In Curl Mapped, Bair interrupts parts of an archival map with curly tendrils of hair, which for her is symbolic of heritage and cultural care.

On view from April 1, 2023 - March 1, 2024 at the Anvil Centre, 777 Columbia Street, New Westminster, BC and will be presented as part of the 10th Annual Capture Photography Festival.