From June Clark's Family Secrets (1992): The artist's autobiographical work reflects the phrase 'the personal is political.'Henry Chan Jr./Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
To record a year she was spending in Paris, Toronto artist June Clark would go every Thursday to a photo booth and a take a picture of herself. Later, she mounted each photo on an enlarged copy of a page from her diary.
The entries would sometimes comment on the photo – “DO I ever look like my mother!!” – or note moods, frustration with work, social events or the anniversary of a still-fresh marriage. It was as though Clark needed to move to a different city to see herself and those around her.
The project from 2004 and 2005 eventually became 42 Thursdays in Paris, a series of works-on-paper included in the Power Plant art gallery’s current survey of Clark’s career.
Clark was born in Harlem, N.Y., in 1941 and moved to Canada in 1968 as the then-wife of a draft dodger. It was in Toronto that she started photography and eventually became an artist. Yet much of her work of recent years looks back to Harlem, to ancestors, to the place and people she left behind.
To create Paris Pages or 42 Thursdays in Paris (2004), Toronto artist June Clark would go every Thursday to a photo booth and a take a picture of herself.Dean Tomlinson/Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
She is in her 80s now, so Witness, the Power Plant’s survey of her work from the 1990s to the present, is belated to say the least – and very welcome. You can get a small taste of her earliest work at the Museum of Contemporary Art these days, where the GTA24 show includes her photography of multicultural Toronto in the 1970s.
If the 1970s work was straight-forwardly documentary, what is showing at the Power Plant reflects the blossoming of her career, featuring art that is often photo-based but sculptural as Clark progressed into making assemblages that included found objects. She works with contemporary themes, such as identity within the Black diaspora, from a deeply personal perspective, using memory, family and nostalgia as leitmotifs to create work that is both pleasingly material and hauntingly elegiac.
June Clark's Harlem Quilt (1997) features streetscapes and scenes with people, sometimes illegible because of the patterning of the fabric, to form a touching tribute to a community, installed in a shrine-like atmosphere.Henry Chan Jr./Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
The first section of the show includes Family Secrets, from 1992, a series of 18 cigar boxes holding objects that evoke people from the artist’s past. We don’t know the characters but the effect is achingly poignant: little boxes holding a fabric doll or a child’s book, a wishbone, some keys and the heel of a shoe, shells, coins and the tiny bones of a bird. One is filled with multiple copies of one photo of a family group cropped out and layered on top of each other to create a little crowd, as though there weren’t quite enough of these people – or memories of these people – to go around.
In the next room, there is a circle of low chairs made from old washboards, a series called Keepers that Clark has been making since 2003. Each one is covered in a different fabric and bears photos or objects referring to different friends or relatives, creating a prayer circle of ancestors and intimates. That’s an evocation of specific people.
On the other hand, Clark’s assemblages, in a series titled The Perseverance Suite, hint at the group identity marked by the memory of enslavement, the years of hard labour and the recurring resilience. These themes are introduced outside the big white gallery, with a single piece sitting spot in a darkened corner in the adjacent space: a coil of old rusty chain.
Inside the gallery, there’s a trowel with wishbones sprinkled with brick dust and a copper pot covered with the heads of two pitchforks, creating what looks like a trap or cage. American Gothic features a pitchfork and a spade, topped with decorative Depression-era glassware. Treks is grippingly simple, a series of rusting railway spikes, with a few pieces of dangling chain, that climb up the gallery’s white wall. The work’s formal arrangement is arresting while its materials are an oblique reference to Harriet Tubman’s work helping escaped slaves.
Treks (2024), from Clark assemblages titled The Perseverance Suite, is part of a series that hints at the group identity marked by the memory of enslavement, the years of hard labour and the recurring resilience.Henry Chan Jr./courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
In 1996, Clark did return to live in Harlem briefly as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum. The centrepiece of the first half of the Power Plant show is Harlem Quilt, a room lit with strings of light bulbs, each one hanging over a scrap of fabric on which a photograph of the neighbourhood has been printed. Streetscapes and scenes with people, sometimes illegible because of the darkness or patterning of the fabric, form a touching tribute to a community, installed in a shrine-like atmosphere.
Clark’s disappointment with American society and history are not front and centre in these quiet works. A show at the Art Gallery of Ontario devoted to a suite of nine pieces based on the American flag is more overt, carrying a denunciation of the way the civil-rights promises of the 1950s and 1960s have been betrayed. Sometimes these are downright obvious. There is a draped flag sewn to a framed piece of paper using embroidery thread that spells out the word “irony.” Other flags are in shreds and an audio track features Clark’s grandchildren pledging allegiance, repeating the promise of “liberty and justice for all” just as she did back in the 1950s. But what is notable about the flags, which were made as early as 1991 and as recently as last year, is their powerful material presence and raw beauty, including the stars and stripes fashioned from rusting bits of flattened metal.
Clark's Dirge (2003), a U.S. flag made of oxidized metal, is part of the Unrequited Love exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery/Courtesy the artist
Clark came of age in that era when feminists coined the phrase “the personal is political” and her autobiographical oeuvre reflects that philosophy. Yet if these political gestures are affecting and effective, it is because of their deep artistry.
Witness continues at the Power Plant to Aug. 11. June Clark: Unrequited Love continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario to Jan. 5.