Soul Power

Vancouver artist Jan Wade draws on personal history to showcase Black struggle.

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Soul Power, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until March 13 is Vancouver artist Jan Wade’s incisive statement on slavery, racism and injustice. It’s the gallery’s first solo exhibition by a Black female artist.

Wade grew up in Hamilton and was heavily influenced by the civil rights movement in Canada and the United States. Her work reflects the unfixed nature of life and the ways the past can reappear, shape and disturb the present.

She works with found objects such as cardboard, buttons, shells, plastic curios and Scrabble tiles. She even draws on recycled brown grocery bag paper, a carryover from her spartan childhood.

“Making do or making the best with what you have coins Black culture,” Wade says. “Africans brought to the New World had to make do with what they had. I kind of grew up in that culture. I loved flea markets, I loved thrift stores.”

Breathe, a multi-panel construction comprised of leftover cloth and threads stitched together, is another example of making do with what’s at hand. It fills an entire room.

“I want these patterns to flow together. I want them to have movement,” Wade says of the piece she dedicated to Eric Garner, a Black man killed in New York in 2014 by a police chokehold.

“He kept saying ‘I cannot breathe’ and from then on I thought of these pieces as breathing … as breath itself.”

Memory Jug, dedicated to Black Lives Matter, spells out the names of others who have died as a result of injustice. A voracious reader, Wade says she loves the power of words and relies on text as both a design tool and as a way to amplify her message.

Epiphany is her signature piece. It's comprised of more than 100 crosses, each one telling a different story, whether honouring a lost loved one or expressing a childhood memory. Wade adds or subtracts crosses each time she exhibits it. She never removes the middle cross, which represents Death.

“I’m really interested in the transference of African spiritual practice to Christianity and the kind of journey it took,” she says. Thus, the maquette Spirit House, representing a spot slaves could meet and worship on a plantation, “isn’t exactly just a Christian thing but it’s also a very African thing. It’s that transmutation of going from here to there.”

Wade’s paintings and drawings round out the show. Self Portrait is typical of her painting style – bold colours outlined in a thick, black line. The painting reads as a reference to Pablo Picasso, who appropriated African masks and sculptures in his work. It also carries symbols that appear in much of her graphic work – the all-seeing eye, tears and an upturned horseshoe, a symbol of good luck.

Wade’s weighty messages around slavery and injustice are markedly inviting and easy to look at. Obamanation, with targets that seem to echo Jasper Johns, has a Pop art vibe. When asked if her playful style detracts from the message, Wade says it’s a deliberate strategy.

“I’m like a Venus flytrap,” she says of her work. “I’m beautiful to look at. You want to move closer and, all of a sudden, you’re learning something.” ■  

Jan Wade: Soul Power at the Vancouver Art Gallery from July 10, 2021 to March 13, 2022.

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