From November 21^st until December 16^th, 2023 FAB Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta

CodesWitcher is a multimedia installation that challenges the erasure of the intersectionality of diasporic, mixed-race identities within historical North American narratives. Centered as an act of reclamation for a chosen identity, CodesWitcher uses languages, painting, virtual reality and sculptural installation to decipher the code-switching of a black presenting body through Acadian, African American, Muscogee Creek, Irish and Scottish heritage.

About the exhibition

In this autoethnographic exhibition, CodesWitcher, I am interested in representing myself as a black body with the intersectionality of Acadian, African American, Muscogee Creek, Irish and Scottish heritage. This is an act of reclamation through a conceptual construction of identity achieved through excavating and interrogating personal archives as I follow the colonial and postcolonial diasporic displacement trajectory within North American narratives. The archives included ancestors enslaved in transatlantic slavery, indentured and displaced through Highland Clearances, and a few who chose their migrations. 

The foundational work comprises research and literature. Site-specific research, artist residencies, and intense language lessons between Ireland, France, Scotland and The United States allowed for the plotting of conceptual maps to guide me to where to retrieve footage and documentation and to confirm lineages. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s (1932-2014) essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse and Sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’s term “double consciousness” from The Souls of Black Folk provided a theoretical structure. Combined, the research and literature allow the viewer to decode/interpret cultural signifiers and “code-switching” by offering generous modalities of visual and written languages to facilitate a better understanding of intersectional cultural and conceptual maps.

Emerging from the foundation work is the intentionality of CodesWitcher, a multimedia installation of a moving/still/audio representation of the past and present encoded with different conceptual maps of culture to allow participants to encounter representation intersectionality within a third space. From within, the viewer’s body is transported into the virtual space of my motherland(s). At the same time, mother and daughter portraits speak of the inheritance of hybrid consciousnesses arriving from the near past. Anchoring the space are folkloric sculptures harkening to Irish and African-American myths. Simultaneously, the landscapes of my homelands offer an imagined ancestor’s perspective.