Constellations — Racial Myths, Land and Labour

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Connie Zheng, “Routes/Roots,” 2021 (photo by Jenna Garrett and the Minnesota Street Project)

Botanical and agricultural ventures, beginning in the 18th century, planted the scientific seeds for colonial and racialized expansion. Although seemingly passive and benign, these practices were integral to European colonizers whose activities dramatically transformed the Americas, Africa, and Asia. 

Such contentious histories are brilliantly contested and reimagined in Constellations: Racial myths, land and labour, a provocative exhibition at Esker Foundation in Calgary until Dec. 15. The show is confronting yet quietly sumptuous and deeply engaging.

Conceived by Toronto-based writer and independent curator Su-Ying Lee, the exhibition connects distinct yet converging artworks through constellations (or colonial patterns). The show explores colonial expansion through brutal practices such as extracting, classifying, and subjugating bodies, plants, and other organic matter for capitalist and racialized gains.

The result is markedly nuanced expressions and tenors from 18 artists with diasporic, Indigenous, and European settler roots. Working across various media — printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography and video installation — the artists uncover, reflect upon and reclaim agency over histories of place, racial identity and labour.

Works by Connie Zheng, Carl Beam, and Hank Willis Thomas consider colonial expansion through geographic representations and juxtapositions between nature and oppressive figures such as Christopher Columbus.  

In Zheng’s large-scale world map, Routes/Roots, she traces the origin of major food plants and their transplantation using undulating white lines that circumnavigate vast blue oceans leading to lush green continental lands. In contrast, Thomas personifies the complexity of the term African American with a map that replaces South America with Africa to reflect a unified homeland for a Black diasporic identity.

Shifting to human geographies, Deborah Jack, Candice Lin and Dinh Q. Lê integrate natural elements such as salt, bird excrement and soil to evoke toiling bodies in harsh landscapes and brutal systems of extraction and exploitation. 

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Carl Beam, “Columbus and Bees,” 1990 (courtesy of Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery)

In Jack’s Foremothers, salt rocks are encased behind glass with poetic text — an essential mineral extracted from the blood, sweat and tears of laboured and trafficked bodies for consumption and greed.

Often called “The Father of Taxonomy,” Carl Linnaeus invented binomial nomenclature, the formal system used to classify the natural world. Still used today, his system left damaging effects such as “scientific” racism. Carrie Mae Weems confronts this anthropological abuse with a photographic intervention that gives witness, dignity, and voice to an enslaved family treated like specimens. 

It’s a powerful gesture that resonates beautifully with works by Bo Wang and Lu Pan, Minerva Cuevas, and Andrea Chung that range from erroneous assertions about infectious air in tropical China, collusion between corrupt governments and US fruit companies to exploit native inhabitants, to bibles encased in caramelized sugar that link Christianity with slavery plantations.

In contrast to other works, artists Aria Dean and Inyang Essien throw shade at these same plantations by transforming stolen agriculture (cotton and rice) into objects that celebrate and give agency to Black narratives, knowledge, and self-identity. 

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Aria Dean, “Dead Zone (4),” 2019 (courtesy of the artist, KADIST Collection)

Identity and place are at the core of portraitures created by Jeff Thomas, Chanell Stone, and Andil Gosine. In his photographic series, Bear Portraits, Thomas uses his son as a marker for Indigeneity in urban sites where it doesn’t exist.

Stone and Gosine echo these racialized narratives about belonging through Black bodies posed within urban nature and descendants from indentured workers elegantly dressed against a sugarcane backdrop

In a final act, two artists playfully and willfully spark rebellions. 

Inspired by a familial plantation in Kenya that grows South American pineapples, David Blandy presents a game where players collaborate in reimaging a post-colonial world on a planet once occupied by an alien force and transplanted fruit. 

In Daniela Ortiz’s, The Rebellion of the Roots, tropical plants start an uprising to seek justice for a racialized people who died at the hands of European colonizers:

“Our corn brought the joy! Anticolonist justice has been served!” ■

Constellations: Racial myths, land and labour is at Esker Foundation in Calgary until Dec. 15.

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