Deanna Bowen, photo courtesy of the artist.
Join us for an afternoon Visual Arts lecture with Deanna Bowen, a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography.
Making Something Out of Nothing: Excavating Black and Afro-Indigenous Life in White Canada
Multi-award-winning artist, Deanna Bowen, works with archival and genealogical methods to examine colonial and white supremacist myths underpinning the development of Canadian national identity. Drawing on her family’s stories as a primary source, Bowen works with oral histories, public and private archives, local histories of early colonial settlers, and slavery records stretching back to the British Empire to assert Black and Indigenous voices and perspectives to the reframing of Canadian social and cultural history. Bowen will discuss her work as it relates to the On Other Archives thematic residency, for which she is faculty.
Working with institutional, personal, fictional and/or speculative archives, participants in the On Other Archives visual arts residency are invited to think critically about the archive as a method or 'technology' for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Themes that participants are exploring may include, but are not limited to, familial/ancestral lineages and cultural inheritance, oral histories, micro-histories, absence, amnesia and re-memory.
This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics. Deanna Bowen is in Banff as faculty of the Visual Arts residency On Other Archives, which invites artists to think critically about the archive as a method or "technology" for re-storying social and cultural narratives. Bowen will discuss her work as it relates to the On Other Archives thematic residency.
Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.
About Deanna Bowen
Deanna Bowen
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is a recipient of a 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Deanna is an Associate Professor in Concordia University’s Studio Arts program. Her writing, interviews, and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is the editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.