Michèle Pearson Clarke

Confronting fears and finding collective solace in song.

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A poignant and potent expression of individual fears and collective solace, Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video installation at Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art succeeds by facing failure, or at least failure as it is often conventionally perceived. 

Clarke, a Trinidadian-born artist based in Toronto, often excavates the hidden losses and traumas of Black and queer people. In creating Quantum Choir, on view until June 17, she sought three other participants, asking that they be queer, masculine-presenting females who think of themselves as “bad singers.” The resulting four-channel video installation documents their choral performance of Queen of Denmark, a tonally tricky piece by queer American singer-songwriter John Grant. 

Four screens, each flanked by two speakers, are attached to metal rigging configured in a square at the centre of the gallery. Sometimes a different image plays on each screen, and sometimes the same image is repeated on all four screens. Viewers, who stand in the middle of this intimate and immersive virtual choir, must choose between focusing on one screen or turning around and around to get a sense of the simultaneous whole. 

When Clarke checked in to find out what her collaborators were planning to wear for the performance, it turned out everyone had put on dark jeans and some form of blue shirt, a synchronicity that Clarke echoed by painting the gallery walls a matching shade of navy. In contrast, the backdrop for each video is a conventionally feminine display of pink florals. 

On the floor surrounding the square is a maze of small plastic cones and soccer balls, a reference to the singers’ shared love of soccer, where masculine-presenting bodies are celebrated.

Each performer worked beforehand with Teiya Kasahara, a non-binary opera singer and voice teacher in Toronto who became known during the pandemic lockdown for their glorious balcony performances. In the videos, they begin tentatively with breathing exercises, shoulder rolls to loosen their muscles, and slightly comical vocal warm-ups. 

It’s a difficult song, an anti-romantic howl of love with lyrics that are, by turns, anguished, angry, self-lacerating and caustically funny. (“I hope you know that all I want from you is sex / To be with someone that looks smashing in athletic wear.”) The singers start at a low pitch, then head into an increasingly full-throated sequence, finally reaching up to a raggedly beautiful and completely cathartic conclusion.

Clarke doesn’t intend the so-called “bad singing” to be a straight one-to-one analogue to internalized queer shame, but there are parallels to the cumulative emotional toll of being constantly appraised against gender norms. The simple head-on framing emphasizes each participant’s vulnerability with singing in public and exposing their self-doubts and fears. We also sense their defiance and liberation and the joy they get from singing together, sheltered in the collective embrace of the music and each other.

With its deceptively simple and contained structure, Quantum Choir brings intense focus to the social languages of gesture, performance and self-presentation, speaking movingly to the ways we inhabit our bodies and – literally – find our voices. ■

Quantum Choir at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg from March 10 to June 17, 2023. Presented in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

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