Destabilization: The Colour of Our Skin

Heidi McKenzie and Shantel Miller

June 10 – July 15, 2022, at
Hamilton Artists Inc.

in Hamilton, ON

Heidi McKenzie and Shantel Miller come together to present gestures of resistance and depict acts of survival as two women of color who navigate their lived experiences on the margins of white-dominant patriarchal culture.

McKenzie interrogates her mixed-race identity, as well as the fragility of her body and that of her immigrant father. The works are a testament to the hidden legacies of Indo-Caribbean indentureship; in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, her paternal ancestors were among those shipped from British India to replace and displace the emancipated Africans as the “new slaves.” These works graphically recount the stories of racialized intergenerational trauma.

Miller pulls from personal narrative as a departure point for exploring notions of interiority and spectatorship in Black female subjectivity. Through an acute sense of touch, her paintings employ color symbolically to suggest a psychological space the figures inhabit and use body language as a tool for distinguishing hierarchies between self and others by depicting the Black body confronting the viewer in varying skin tones of browns and greys.

Each artist’s aesthetic narratives operate on both the deeply personal – through self-portraiture, abstract or figurative – as well as the universal, by validating brown bodies through archival practices of touching and whispering wisdom through familial legacy.

Text written by Heidi McKenzie and Shantel Miller. Images provided by Hamilton Artist's Inc. and taken by Grant Alan Holt.