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.