Outgraced
Karen Miranda Augustine
A Space Main Gallery
June 20 – July 19, 2014
Curated by: Rachel Gorman
Artist Talk Saturday July 5th, 2-4pm
Outgraced’s richly textured icons unite the sexual, the soul wound, and the sublime in ways that are deeply rooted in Indigenous and West African spirituality to meditate on violence and harm, grief and serenity, exaltation and delight.
Augustine’s work is a reconfiguration of representations of female sexuality through an aesthetic process of disidentification. Presenting us with an alternative historiography, and gesturing toward a process of reparation, Augustine turns liberal feminist and queer historiographies on their head through a meticulous process of re-contextualization.
Biographies
Karen Miranda Augustine is a Canadian artist, writer and videomaker whose works have exhibited in Canada, the US, Scotland, and Haiti at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince. She has been published and cited in several books and publications, including Caribbean InTransit Arts Journal, The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (Cleis Press) and The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press). Formerly, she was the founding editor of At the Crossroads: A Journal for Women Artists of African Descent (1992-97), editor of the now defunct MIX: independent art & culture magazine, beloved CKLN 88.1 FM radio host of BASS: Black Afrikan Sistuhs of Soul (1992-2003), and a poet who had opened for Philadephia recording artist Ursula Rucker, writer Dionne Brand, and dub poet Lillian Allen. In 2004, she recorded “Sapphire” for the jazz/poetry compilation The New World Reveal-a-Solution (Urbanicity Recordings), produced by Chicago DJ Shannon Harris. Three years later, her piece Miranda and Child (RaRa Rah) was awarded third place at the CRUX juried exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia. Karen Miranda’s creative projects ride on the confluence of pop culture, spirituality and the underground. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University.
Rachel Gorman is a performance artist working in dance theatre, video, and installation. Since receiving her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005 with a dissertation on cultural production and class consciousness, Gorman has held a Lectureship at the Women and Gender Studies Institute of the University of Toronto; Research Fellowships at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University at Buffalo (SUNY); and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship exploring disability politics of Kurdish national liberation struggles. In 2006, Gorman premiered The Ghost, a dance film about Kurdish political prisoners. The Globe and Mail’s Paula Citron called Gorman’s 2002 anti-war production Waking the Living compelling a disturbing and riveting reality check and described her 2004 production Passing Dark as a melancholy journey of intense sadness. Gorman created Transit, a gallery installation on mixed-race identity and political suspicion, in 2007; and combined performance and video to create Pass in 2009 and Fall in 2010.