Persimmon Blackbridge | Speak No (emergency)

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Persimmon Blackbridge, “Fire (fighters),” 2024

(detail) (courtesy of the Gallery)

In this stunning installation Speak No (emergency), artist Persimmon Blackbridge urgently responds to the devastation of and despair around climate change. Covering the gallery walls with dozens of handfashioned figures, she creates a desolate, desperate army who have come together in the face of rampant forest fires, polluted oceans, and climate denial. Blackbridge’s raw, frenetic aesthetic integrates found wood, Barbie doll parts, bits of animal bone, scrap metal, and other recycled materials typically considered trash.

This exhibition is organized in partnership with Tangled Art + Disability.

About the artist: Celebrated as a Canadian trailblazer in socially engaged art, Persimmon Blackbridge has made queer, feminist, and disability art from the late 70s to today. Together with writer Sheila Gilhooley, she created the 1980s exhibition Still Sane, a then groundbreaking combination of sculpture and text and one of the earliest examples of first-person narrative art in Canada, as well as a pioneering exhibit of disability art. She was a member of the Kiss & Tell collective whose installation Drawing the Line was a potent intervention against censorship in the feminist “Porn Wars” of the 1980’s. In the 90s, Blackbridge collaborated with 27 former residents of BC’s large institutions for people with intellectual disabilities on the installation From the Inside/Out, which was instrumental in winning reparations for former residents of Woodlands Institution. From 2015 to 2020, her series Constructed Identities toured Ontario and BC, disputing the social construction of tragic disability.