June Clark
Witness

Itself a long-overdue tribute to an artist of remarkable ingenuity, Witness is propelled by a logic of homage — to June Clark’s artistic idols, and to the inspiring resourcefulness of friends and family. The works assembled for this ambitious surveyare materially complex and conceptually rewarding.

Some of the series on view testify to Clark’s layered approach to image-making. 2191 Reprise (1997) repurposes photographs captured during a fertile two-year stay as artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, her first time living in the stimulating neighbourhood of her youth since immigrating to Canada in 1968. Transferred to paper through a rubbing technique, creating waxy textures evocative of the tracings and elisions of memory in Freud’s meditations on the children’s toy known as the Mystic Writing-Pad, the images are accompanied by stencilled texts that record the heady atmosphere of life at 2191 8th Avenue, Clark’s childhood address. If 2191 Reprise memorializes a Harlem past, Harlem Quilt (1997) bears witness to the contemporary community that Clark encountered during her 1996 – 97 residency. Printed on thrift-store fabric scraps, casual street photography is transformed into a moving installation of illuminated shrines.