DEANNA BOWEN, "Stories to Pass On," February 25, April 15, 2012, Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat

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Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie"

Deanna Bowen, Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie," 2009, colour DVD, looping single-channel video projection.

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"Shadow on the Prairie"

Deanna Bowen, Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie," 2009, colour DVD, looping single-channel video projection.

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"Preacherman Stela"

Deanna Bowen, "Preacherman Stela"

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"Our Father"

Deanna Bowen, "Our Father"

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"False Friend"

Deanna Bowen, "False Friend"

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Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie"

Deanna Bowen, Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie," 2009, colour DVD, looping single-channel video projection.

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"Shadow on the Prairie"

Deanna Bowen, Video still from "Shadow on the Prairie," 2009, colour DVD, looping single-channel video projection.

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Deanna Bowen

"Joyful Praise"

Deanna Bowen, "Joyful Praise," 2007, archival inkjet prints on epson photo paper.

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Deanna Bowen

"Worship in Song"

Deanna Bowen, "Worship in Song," 2007, archival inkjet prints on epson photo paper.

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"Treasury in Song"

Deanna Bowen, "Treasury in Song," 2007, archival inkjet prints on epson photo paper.

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DEANNA BOWEN, Stories to Pass On

Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat

February 25 to April 15, 2012

By Monique Westra

Deanna Bowen’s great-grandparents fled the United States in the wake of the officially sanctioned and legislated Jim Crow segregation laws. They were among the original founders in 1909 of Amber Valley, one of three settlements of black immigrants to Alberta. About 100 miles north of Edmonton, the town was the largest community of black people in Alberta until the 1930s. Bowen’s mother was raised there and it was where Deanna spent the first eight years of her childhood. Seeking a better life and more educational opportunities for their large family, Bowen’s grandparents moved to Vancouver, and it’s only recently, as a result of research for her next project, that Bowen has come to understand the racial imperatives that played a role in the move away from Alberta, where the Klu Klux Klan was active.

She goes back further to find the family histories that make up her current show, Stories to Pass On.... It’s based on a 2008 road trip to Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas, part of a quest to retrace the migration of her ancestors. Although it was never openly talked about in her family, Bowen knew that she was descended from slaves, and during that trip, she confirmed that her family had been slaves in Pine Flat Alabama. She found the plantation where they had lived, worked and died, and met relatives who were their direct descendants. She learned about her mixed African and Aboriginal heritage, and made the discovery that her ancestors had been enslaved, paradoxically, by Native peoples. Each avenue of research leads to another path and even as she elucidates her family’s story over time and place, it builds in complexity as more and more layers are added, all of the research feeding her art.

Deanna Bowen: Stories to pass on... features two video and sound installations: Gospel and Shadow on the Prairie (from The Vancouver Project). The complex, interdisciplinary work includes video and sound installation, performance, sculpture and photography. Driven by an urgent need to know and to experience her own family and its tangled, often hidden history, Bowen draws on public and private sources to create layered, multifaceted and emotionally-charged art. Her methodology is both scholarly and spontaneous — thorough and academically sound, yet open to tangents, unexpected and surprising associations. She makes metaphorical and imaginative leaps in order to follow the thread of a story, wherever it might lead.

Bowen combines aspects of official historical narratives with personal histories, enriched and animated by insights from literary, musical and cinematic sources. The title of the exhibition was directly inspired by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel that deals with a community of former slaves and their efforts to overcome the effects of their collective trauma. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Bowen notes that Morrison’s book touches on the key concerns of her art, namely “....the internal and external obstacles that impede the telling of personal truths” and “the restorative possibilities of working through traumatic histories.” Bowen’s powerful art has a healing dimension for her personally. As she uncovers and recounts her African-Canadian family’s stories and situates them in broader historical, societal and cultural contexts, she comes to terms with the past. By giving her a way to understand her estranged family, what they did and did not do, her art opens up the possibility of reconciliation.

Gospel is comprised of three separate but related elements. On the walls are seven framed inkjet prints, each featuring the enlarged cover of a hymnal. The verisimilitude is convincing, making each faded and tattered cover seem vividly present. Hymnals are potent signifiers — of Christianity and its moral strictures, of song and celebration, of community, and of the specific individual, now unknown, who once owned it and opened its pages every Sunday. The suite of framed hymnals relates directly to a vertical speaker / sculpture called Preacherman (Stela), which broadcasts the voice of her preacher grandfather singing hymns.

The third component of Gospel is a dramatic video compilation, Imitation of Life (A Hypothesis), a moving collage of appropriated clips from the movie, Imitation of Life. The audio and video segments fuse, overlap and interweave in a crescendo of mounting tension. The discord and alienation that marks the relationship between mother and daughter in the film speaks to the estrangement between Bowen and her own mother.

The work is technologically complex, and Bowen creates layered, non- linear and fragmentary narratives, rich in visual and auditory associations that allude to the specific history of her family within the broader context of its African-Canadian heritage. Her work also has wider resonance, speaking to the hidden stories embedded within every family — stories that are not passed on, replaced by glossed-over and sanitized myths of family lore.

Bowen’s family secrets were hidden behind the rigid and judgemental strictures of the familial home, based in the Christian fundamentalism preached by her grandfather. The family was dominated by an unforgiving tradition of moral rectitude that impacted every aspect of their lives, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Her family search led her to the story, suppressed in her family, of a closeted gay great-uncle who was a performer in jazz clubs in Vancouver, and to his lover, a costume designer who was involved in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s 1952 production of Shadow on the Prairie, filmed by the National Film Board of Canada, which led her to another thread in Stories to pass on....

The acclaimed and original Canadian ballet about settlement in Western Canada tells a tragic story of the despair, madness and suicide of a young bride, and Bowen recognized in the bride’s desperation and entrapment aspects of her great-uncle Herman’s life. The coincidental connection of the ballet with his life prompted Bowen to bring the two stories together. Bowen’s installation, Shadow on the Prairie, is made up of wall text and a video, fragmented excerpts from the NFB film, overlaid with a plaintive lament as well as graphic and photographic images that recall Herman and black performers in the repressed era of the fifties. The ballet is set in Alberta in the same harsh landscape that formed the backdrop to Bowen’s family history.

After her early childhood in northern Alberta and a relocation to Vancouver at 8, Bowen was raised primarily by her maternal grandparents. She attended Simon Fraser University and later earned a diploma in sculpture from the Emily Carr College of Art. After graduation in 1994 at 25, Bowen moved to Toronto, and in 2008, she completed a Master of Visual Arts degree at the University of Toronto. Today she works as an academic and an acclaimed artist. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Toronto and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

There’s a strong intellectual foundation in Deanna Bowen’s work, and it’s grounded in thorough historical scholarship. While its references are culturally specific and its inspirational antecedents densely layered, each complex work speaks directly to the heart because of her deep personal connection to it.

Deanna Bowen: Stories to pass on... is on at the Esplanade Gallery in Medicine Hat February 25 to April 15. Organized by the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario, it’s curated by Carl Lavoy.