Garb of Innocence (2022)

“…citizenship is not a stable status that one simply struggles to achieve, but an arena of conflict and negotiation.” — Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008

The images from this series are monuments to the soft systems of power exerted by formal and informal symbols of “Canadian” identity and the meaning we ascribe them. They concern the multiple truths that co-exist within the process of national-identity-building, a process abundant in contradictions, mimicry and camouflage in the endless pursuit of becoming less Other-ed within romanticized colonialist structures that continue to intrude on the present.

Visually, Garb of Innocence references the landscapes represented in Group of Seven paintings; that is, it references the terra incognita (unknown land) painted by the Group, from which they erased any existence of indigenous peoples living there before them.

This idea that we can rally behind a flag and a song and a coffee franchise and some famous paintings of nature and a metanarrative about how we’re all immigrants in this great experiment of a country often feels facile and bankrupt and distorted. Perhaps this is so because I’ve never identified with it myself, because I, like many, hold within me multiple identities, and I, too, feel the pressure to mimic – in ways that I’m often wholly unaware of – the colonising culture in order to camouflage myself, to fit in. But perhaps this is so because that is what it is. Perhaps citizenship (and the national identity that it automatically confers) is performative. Dance the dance and I’ll let you in.

This work was circuitously informed by my conversations and interactions with migrants who have experienced incarceration and detention (sometimes indefinite) on Canadian soil and the organizations that support them. A Garb of Innocence means: if you are presumed innocent, you should be allowed to dress as if you’re innocent (ie your own damn clothes). All Canadians are accorded this right. Immigration detainees held in Canadian prisons and detention centres are not.

And so we come full circle, thinking about identity within the greater context of immigration and who gate keeps the terms of that identity on land that belongs that was taken from someone else.

This series of photographs was created with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.