Michèle Pearson Clarke: Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)

×

Expand

Michèle Pearson Clarke, "Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome)," 2018

featuring Danielle, digital video still.

The New Gallery presents Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome), an exhibition by Michèle Pearson Clarke.

Come join us for an opening reception for members and invited guests on Friday, September 13 at 8PM. Admission is free and all are welcome. 

Screening / Saturday, September 14 at 6:30PM at Globe Cinema

In conjunction with this exhibition, Clarke has curated a screening of Karen Chapman’s Lesson’s Injustice (2017, running time of 8 minutes) and Charles Officer’s Unarmed Verses (2016, running time of 85 minutes) on Saturday, September 14 at 6:30 PM at Globe Cinema. Tickets are available through Eventbrite or at the door for $12. Students and current TNG members can purchase tickets for $10. All proceeds from this screening will go towards supporting TNG’s future programming and operations.

Exhibition Description

In Shade Compositions (2005-present), a series of live performances and videos, the African-American artist Rashaad Newsome explores issues of Black authorship, appropriation, identity and belonging by conducting choirs of women (and sometimes, gay men) of colour who snap their fingers, smack their lips, roll their eyes, and cock their heads, creating expressive linguistic symphonies out of the nonverbal gestures and vocalizations of African-American women. Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) (2018) is a three-channel video and sound installation that both responds to and extends this inquiry by focusing on sucking teeth, an everyday oral gesture shared by Black people of African and Caribbean origin and their diasporas, including those of us who live here in Canada.

Referred to variously as kiss teeth, chups, steups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened. West Africathis action is used to signify a wide range of negative affects, including irritation, disapproval, disgust, disrespect, anger and frustrationn in origin, . Given that representations of African-American Blackness dominate and define mainstream understandings of the Black experience, when it comes to anti-black racism, most white Canadians are allowed to feel comfortable and are supported in their comfort by the historical and ongoing narratives of “not me,” “not us,” “only them, down there.” Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) is a response to the frustrations of living within this denial, and an expression of the anger and pain that many Black people often experience living in Canada, where we are always assumed to be better off, if not completely free of racism.

Biographies

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist, writer and educator who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process-oriented strategies, her work explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and screenings at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2019), LagosPhoto Festival (2018), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Art (2018), Le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2018), ltd los angeles (2018), and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016). Based in Toronto, Clarke holds an MSW from the University of Toronto, and in 2015 she received her MFA in Documentary Media Studies from Ryerson University, where she is currently a contract lecturer. Most recently, Clarke has been awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts 2019 Finalist Artist Prize, and she has been appointed to serve a three-year term as the second Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto.

Nataleah Hunter-Young is a film programmer, writer, and PhD Candidate in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York Universities. She has supported festival programming for the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa. In 2019, Nataleah became a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar which will support her ongoing doctoral research on late representations of mediated police brutality in contemporary art. She was born, raised, and is currently based in Toronto.