Conceptions of White

Important exhibition vaporizes ideas behind white identity.

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White people, the white cube and white guilt are some “conceptions of white” addressed by the eponymous exhibition at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Co-curated by the gallery’s director, John G. Hampton, and Lillian O’Brien Davis, curator of Toronto’s Gallery 44, the construction of white as a neutral default is revealed as an insubstantial phantasm that is not so much dismantled as vaporized.

Conceptions of White, on view until Nov. 13, grew out of an earlier project that Hampton, the first Indigenous director of a major public gallery in Canada, undertook when he was curator-in-residence at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, which, he says, “got me interested in my own relationship to whiteness.”

Confronting one’s relationship with whiteness can be uncomfortable. In submitting to a facial recognition scan by Toronto-based Jennifer Chan’s Aryan Recognition Toolkit, I worried that surveillance technology would expose innate racism in my features.

Chan’s project, created in response to early conversations about the exhibition with Hampton, points to the inherent biases in facial recognition, its use to criminalize certain people, and so-called scientific racism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Aryan Recognition Toolkit compares viewers’ faces to a dataset of dozens of photos of Nazi SS commanders in a canny inversion of the pseudoscientific precepts of phrenology and eugenics, which falsely posit that character, intelligence and criminal tendencies have physical analogues.

American artist Fred Wilson’s Love and Loss in the Milky Way recognizes how whiteness supported the emergence of capitalism and industrialization. Porcelain replicated in milk glass and statues reduced to tchotchkes are arranged in a tabletop vista. The distinguishing features and hairstyles of the chalky plaster heads, busts and nudes meld into the uniformly creamy topography of ornamental dishware. This spread of opalescent splendour is punctuated by the black-glazed face of a ceramic “mammy” cookie jar at the head of the table – not a person but simply a vessel for dispensing comfort food.

In a move worthy of Wilson, the curators have created a wealth of witty new ways to understand Portal, a stark, white, angular and monolithic sculpture by American artist Robert Morris. Echoing the supposedly neutral architecture of the gallery, his Minimalist doorway speaks volumes about inclusion and exclusion. Portal viscerally reproduces the sort of normative body that was the default 60 years ago – slim, white, male, able – in the void at its centre.

Institutional critique plays out in other fascinating curatorial choices. Copies – a plaster cast of the bronze Apollo Belvedere and a plastic replica of American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave – undercut the role of art history and museums as arbiters of worth. By dismissing authenticity and originality, the curators devalue historical associations created by institutions that equate white with value. The narratives of wilful misinterpretation and misrepresentation that unfold in the extended labels for these works are particularly juicy reading.

The three-panel label for Powers’ 1843 sculpture narrates a salacious fascination with harems and the invention of the Caucasian race as synonymous with white. Purportedly addressing the Greek War of Independence, Powers’ slave is notably white, crafted to appeal to buyers on both sides of the American abolitionist movement. Although Powers created six full-size iterations of Greek Slave, the MacKenzie exhibition includes a 3D-printed replica. In an ironic echo of white fragility, the original plaster model and the marble sculptures were too delicate to transport to Regina.

American artist Arthur Jafa’s 30-minute video montage, The White Album, is masterfully assembled from publicly posted videos. When the discomfort evoked by a man in a polo shirt staring down the camera while silently loading and unloading ammunition clips from his automatic weapon becomes too much, Jafa cuts to another tone of discomfort, such as a flash-mob dance by techno-goth teens. The video, a long watch, requires an even longer period of thought and reflection.

“After all,” mused a friend who accompanied me to the exhibition, “who has thought less about whiteness than white people?” ■

Conceptions of White at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina from Aug. 6 to Nov. 13, 2022.

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MacKenzie Art Gallery

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