June Clark: Witness as a Kind of Love
Power Plant exhibition is first Canadian survey of Toronto artist's work
Installation view, June Clark, “Harlem Quilt,” 1997, photo transfers on fabric, light fixture (photo by LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery)
Wishbones. Feathers. Rope. Chain. Iron. Fragments. Trowel. Self-portraits. June Clark’s Witness places all these objects and their material histories in conversation. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto brings together Clark’s major works such as Harlem Quilt from 1997, created when Clark returned to her birthplace of Harlem, New York after leaving for Toronto in 1968, and Family Secrets, a series of sculptural assemblages in black cigar boxes, completed in 1992. Spanning from the ’90s to the present, Clark’s Witness nuances what it means to “see.”
2191 Reprise combines photographs made during a 1996-1997 residency in Harlem, paired with stencilled texts detailing memories of living at 2191 Eighth Avenue in Central Harlem. One recalls a memory of her grandfather, stencilled around a sepia-toned photo transfer on paper: “Grandpa sometimes came up in the fall to watch the World Series with us. He would bring us corn, peanuts and smoked meat from the farm. He used to bring us popping corn too. Every time he would come, he would say that he didn’t know how we could live in these little boxes in New York.” The image of the tops of buildings and a lamp post is transferred in a way that makes visible the texture of the paper beneath. A deep range of blacks, greys, and white elicits the tenderness of the memory.
Another work in the series details an incident of racism, which leads a woman named Miss Ruby to cough up some phlegm in the food she was about to serve to dinner guests who had called her the n-word. A surprising work documents sound: “From the moans in night I thought that my neighbour had gotten lucky. It turns out it was a friend of hers who is dying from AIDS.” The stencilled text is halved by a photo of a bridge, the soft white points of light harkening glimpses through tears, distance, and pain.
June Clark, detail of “Keepers,” 2004–2023, mixed media (photo by LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery)
Family Secrets gathers 18 cigar boxes displaying various objects associated with the memory of a person from Clark’s past. A reimagining of the original installation at The Power Plant in 1992, Family Secrets places seemingly quotidian objects together, evoking layered histories. In one box, a wishbone is placed on top of a black cross whose edges touch the box frame perfectly. The fork of the wishbone faces downward, conjuring a matrix of wishes — in harmony and/or contradiction — depending on one’s belief. The superimposition of the off-white bone on the black cross is striking and elegant.
Clark’s poetic mode of witness emerges in another cigar box, where two keys face the worn-out heel of a shoe. In a more ominous composition, wooden pegs are placed beside thick iron nails like railway spikes. Surprisingly the colours of wood and metal resonate across the collection, notably in a box containing a series of family photographs. Clark gathers photographs that feature family members whose photos have been taken from roughly the same distance, cutting closely around the heads of the people and layering them together, so that it seems as though they are all in one big choir; some faces are black and white, others browning and blurry. The soft lighting in the gallery shone around the edges of their heads giving them all fuzzy haloes which made me smile.
Harlem Quilt from 1997 documents Clark’s return to the city where she was born, 28 years after living in Toronto. Clark walked the streets with a Leica held at her hip, recalling Vivian Maier and her Rolleiflex. She transferred the photographs onto scraps of cloth bought from the Salvation Army. The effect is akin to being at both a celebration and a shrine. Each cloth-image is lit by a single bulb hanging from a cord that connects other cloth-images. In one, a man leans against a pole with a relaxed gaze, another features a staircase. A woman smiles. The photo cracks. Trees stretch at sunset. In an interview with The Power Plant, Clark says that she never knew what she had until she processed the film each day because she didn’t want to editorialize what she was seeing. The poet Jason Allen-Paisant says that “at home people see you with their whole body.” Witness, here, is the way the artist’s body remembers place.
June Clark, detail of “Treks” (from “The Perseverance Suite”), 2024, aged railroad spikes and chains (photo by LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery)
Treks (from The Perseverance Suite), dated 2024, responds to Harriet Tubman, who was instrumental in helping people escape slavery using the network known as the Underground Railroad. Clark’s sculpture features aged railroad spikes and chains placed on the bare white wall, recalling climbing and ascent. The shadows of the metals against the wall are wing-like and dark, almost as solid as the materials, reminding us that the afterlives of slavery are deeply felt in the present.
44 Thursdays in Paris enlarges photo-booth photos that Clark took every Thursday at 10 a.m. in various places around Paris. Placed against enlarged prints of her daily diary entries, Clark’s ordinary notes are joyous and rich, even when she forces herself to get up and get on Paris time. I marvelled at the artist’s expressive face and the way she writes her dates like sums. In one photo where she looks particularly somber, she writes, “I am trying to find out who this person is in the photograph... I look as if I’m crying and skeptical....I feel the best I’ve felt all week!”
I was in the gallery admiring Clark’s face, thinking of Audre Lorde’s declaration that “poetry is not a luxury” and that witnessing oneself is a political act of self-love — until my attention was drawn to a person speaking to another beside me: June Clark! We locked eyes instantly. “Is that you?” I asked, pointing to the photos. We laughed and I wanted to joke that I just had a 45th Thursday in Paris.
Witness can be a kind of love, if I can borrow from Dionne Brand’s forthcoming reflections in Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. Speaking of Kevin Adonis Browne, Brand writes that his essay, Hinges, Latches, Locks, Roseau, is about love, “about that particular love that is witness to the other life, the everyday life that accompanies the observation of empire — when one notices simultaneously the life called away from, and the life going on against, empire’s drift.” Clark’s Witness dwells in that particular love — the other life of the everyday. ■
June Clark: Witness is on view at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto until Aug. 11.
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