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On now until May 23rd, 2022
Exploring the vulnerability of queer female masculinity, Michèle Pearson Clarke: Muscle Memory is the first major solo exhibition in a public gallery for Trinidad-born, Toronto-based artist Michèle Pearson Clarke. Working primarily in photography and video, Clarke examines black and queer experiences of longing and loss, while situating such grief as a site of possibility for social engagement and political connection. With Muscle Memory, Clarke presents her largest installation to date, comprising both a new four-channel video and sound work, Quantum Choir, 2022 and a selection of photographs from her ongoing series, The Animal Seems to Be Moving, 2018-present.
Created for this exhibition, Quantum Choir reflects on the vulnerability of learning to sing as a way of exploring the legibility, precarity, and affinity of contemporary queer female masculinity. Set in a custom architectural structure in the centre of a large gallery space, the video installation brings together four participants, including the artist, to work through the insecurity, worry and shame of being a bad singer. Following weeks of voice lessons with a vocal coach, the participants collaboratively construct a performance for the camera, progressing from initial vocal warm-ups right through to singing the same pop song. As in previous works, Clarke here uses performative gestures and repetition across the four screens to construct a video choir that harnesses queer kinship and intimacy to navigate a complex mix of privilege, oppression, power and invisibility.
In The Animal Seems to Be Moving, Clarke turns to self-portraiture for the first time to map a shift in her masculine appearance, one marked by both loss and fear. Long perceived to be younger than her age, with this ongoing body of work, she considers the experience of aging out of being read as a young black boy and aging in to being read as a middle-aged black man. Given the threat that black masculinity poses to many, the series is at once a mourning of her own queer boyhood as well as a grappling with the absurdity of having to face increased hostility because of growing older. Deploying performance and humour, these self-portraits allow us to see Clarke looking at herself as she imagines something closer to the truth of what it means to age otherwise in her black, queer masculine body.
Michèle Pearson Clarke is a visual artist, writer and educator who works in photography, film, video and installation. Born in Trinidad (1973), and 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. Clarke has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including in Chicago, Lagos, Los Angeles and Montréal, and she is the current Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022).On now until May 23rd, 2022
Exploring the vulnerability of queer female masculinity, Michèle Pearson Clarke: Muscle Memory is the first m …
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[Music]
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all of my work is about pre-fund laws
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and the the very life experience that
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sent me back to school
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in midlife was
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the grief i felt after my mother passed
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away so i had a very traumatic grief
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experience
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and it sort of cleaved my life into two
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and going back to school like i almost
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felt like i had to give birth to
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something new to survive her death
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in any artwork in any you know
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literature anything that has to do with
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grief and loss you’re looking at
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vulnerability
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and for whatever reason life lifelong i
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have a greater comfort level with
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vulnerability than the average person
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i’ve come to understand through asking
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people to do things that they don’t want
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to do in my artwork
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but with both of these projects and
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particularly quantum choir after making
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a few projects that had asked other
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people to be vulnerable i came to a sort
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of point in my practice where i wanted
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to think about what it would mean for me
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to put myself in this place that i was
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asking community
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too
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[Music]
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my greatest source of vulnerability was
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singing and so
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you know i’ve had
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like a lifelong shame
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around my inability to sing and so
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singing became a way to both
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practically confront
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that vulnerability but also
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work with these three other women to
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invite the audience to think about not
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only the vulnerability of us learning to
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sing but the vulnerability of you know
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moving through the world as
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female-bodied but masculine people
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[Music]
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the song that we sing is queen of
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denmark by the artist john grant
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he himself is a queer artist it’s always
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my most played album of the year i
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wanted us to sing a song that would be a
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love song
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i wanted us to sing a song that would
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have like an edge do it you know and
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have some kind of
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uh personality and not just really soft
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and poppy um and i also wanted a song
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that had a soaring sense that it’s
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something that we could really
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you know kind of give her and like get
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in there and let it go so this song kind
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of fit all of the all of the criteria in
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terms of thinking about the level of
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sort of acoustic performance that that i
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wanted to bring in
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the emphasis was not on arriving at a
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polish performance the emphasis was on
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communicating to the viewer um
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the process right that these are four
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people who spent two months learning to
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sing this song
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and and when i was working with the
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three of them you know we we filmed each
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person separately and i really wanted
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each participant to have
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you know forget what happened with the
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art i was like the foremost thing is
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this is for us this is for each of us to
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lean into this hard thing together and
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to have this personal
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um experience of overcoming a certain
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amount of shame and a certain amount of
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fear that we each individually feel
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and so they didn’t see the others
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singing they i was like you don’t don’t
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worry what the others are doing you
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don’t have to do it a certain way
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there’s no right or wrong you do you
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and i knew that it would work no matter
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what
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[Music]
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oh
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