DESI DIARY

ACROSS LATITUDES: BETWEEN CULTURES AND GENERATIONS

Toronto artist Heidi McKenzie explores the complex terrain of cultural migration and commodification in the lanterns that illuminate the lives of Coolie Belles.

Across Latitudes examines the intricate realities of moving between cultures and across generations in the process of forging identities and locating our place in the world.

The distinct art practices of Soheila Esfahani, Heidi McKenzie and Zinnia Naqvi all draw from experiences of diaspora to explore the complex terrain of cultural migration and commodification.

This exhibition highlights the artifice of sites and objects that are intended to represent national identity – images in postcards, gift shop trinkets – and how they simplify and misrepresent the realities of lived experience. The works shown here consider the uncomfortable impact of such commodities on the process of shaping personal identity and aim to unravel the stereotypes they perpetuate. By holding these objects up for examination, and by integrating a diverse range of culturally significant markers of personal identity, such as traditional motifs, family and archival photographs, and mementos from childhood, these three artists engage in creative acts of revisiting, reworking, and reclaiming to offer new interpretations and meanings.

All three artists in this exhibition inscribe, in different ways, their experiences of belonging amid the construct of what it means to be Canadian. Turning to their uniquely individual paths of migration – with diasporic roots in Iran, the Caribbean, and Pakistan – their works counter the limitations of myth-making and foreground the multi-dimensionality of intercultural experience.

There will be a separate room at the exhibition, dimmed with 12 of the lanterns McKenzie created to illuminate the lives of Coolie Belles.

Some of her installation works that draw on narratives of family and migration, including one new piece, House Work, include:

Looking Back (the window frame pieces are double sided, you walk around them).

Coinage (abstract representations of the Coolie Belle’s coin necklaces).

Division (metaphor for the class divide between the lives of the Indentured workers and the plantation owners who might have had a room divider in their opulent drawing rooms).

House of Cards, a metaphor of her father’s immigrant life.

At the Across Latitudes exhibition, there will be a separate room at the exhibition, dimmed with 12 of the lanterns McKenzie created to illuminate the lives of Coolie Belles. Image credit: HEIDI McKENZIE.

When and where: At the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Until September 29, Across Latitudes, featuring works by Soheila Esfahani, Heidi McKenzie and Zinnia Naqvi, curated by Shannon Anderson. Artist Panel: Saturday, September 28, 2-4 pm.

More info at www.artgalleryofmississauga.com.