Sasha Huber, Tailoring Freedom, 2021. Metal staples on photograph on wood, 97 x 69 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tamara Lanier. Installation view of the exhibition YOU NAME IT, at the Power Plant gallery at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre until May 1, 2022.Henry Chan Jr./Power Plant
If a certain university in downtown Toronto wished to rename itself with some panache, it might consider the work of Sasha Huber.
She is a visual artist of Haitian and Swiss extraction and, since 2007, she has been engaged in a great renaming project. Huber’s particular target is Louis Agassiz, the 19th-century Swiss-American geologist, glaciologist and anti-evolutionist who used pseudo-science to justify racial inequality. Because of his work in geology, there are lakes and mountains from Switzerland to Canada named for the man and, whether the appropriate authorities approve or not, Huber is determined to anoint them with fresh identities. She has chartered a helicopter to plant a new plaque on a Swiss peak, travelled to New Zealand to join a Maori elder in a chant of spiritual reclaiming, and ridden on horseback into the Praca Agassiz in Rio de Janeiro to read a declaration about the dubious character who gave his name to this public square.
The results of this large project – videos, paper documents and surprisingly gentle photographic works – are now showing at the Power Plant in Toronto for Huber’s first solo show in North America. The exhibition, curated by Noor Alé, is entitled You Name It.
But what are you going to name it? The most poignant aspect of Huber’s art is its recognition of Renty, an enslaved person who Agassiz had photographed naked from the waist up as evidence of his theories. The photographs of Renty and his daughter, Delia, are the property of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, although a descendant of Renty’s, with the support of Agassiz’s descendants, has sued to have them turned over – unsuccessfully so far.
Huber has reproduced the photos on wooden panels and clothed father and daughter by means of a staple gun. With line upon line of silver hyphens, she creates shimmering garments in a remarkable gesture that incorporates both the violence of the lash and the honour of the new robes. In the midst of more emphatic documentary materials, such as the video of a parka-clad Huber renaming Switzerland’s Agassizhorn as Rentyhorn, these striking wall pieces resonate with deeper and softer notes.
Huber began her project by joining a citizens’ group dedicated to renaming Agassiz features, and her exhibition includes footage of a press conference at which the petitioners for the Renty photos made their case against Harvard. Her art belongs to that contemporary strain rooted in documentary research and moving into outright advocacy.
That’s also the modus operandi for Shona Illingworth, an artist of Danish and Scottish heritage who lives in the U.K., and who is the second international artist in the Power Plant’s reopening lineup, with a show entitled Topologies of Air and curated by Amin Alsaden.
Shona Illingworth incorporates archival images of people on St. Kilda in her work.Henry Chan Jr./Power Plant
Illingworth is concerned with the commercialization and militarization of the skies, and established the Airspace Tribunal with U.K. law professor Nick Grief to push for a human right to live without threat from above. It’s hard to disagree that there is something spooky and wrong about the colonization, privatization and surveillance of the sky over our heads, site of our reveries and our breath, but videos of human-rights hearings investigating covert activities in what should be public airspace don’t make particularly interesting art. Giclée prints in which Illingworth creates bold mosaics mixing photos with colourful maps and sky charts feel like an afterthought.
Her more delicate work is tucked way upstairs at the Power Plant, where a project entitled Amnesia Museum considers the intersection of personal memory and state power. Illingworth recalls the citizens of St. Kilda, Scotland, who had little choice but to leave their primitive island homes in 1930 partly because British governments wouldn’t extend modern services to the isolated archipelago in the Outer Hebrides. This set the stage for an evacuation rather reminiscent of events in some Newfoundland outports. After the Second World War, the islands were used for military testing. The inhabitants are remembered through a series of archival film stills that show them fleeing – from the camera actually – but the effect is of a haunting witness to their evacuation. Meanwhile, a narrator reads a text in their language, Hebridean Gaelic.
The video installation Lesions in the Landscape adds in a contemporary woman named Claire, who has a brain injury that causes her amnesia, which is compared with the cultural losses of St. Kilda. Illingworth has also made a model of the actual lesion in Claire’s brain and put it on display. It’s the human link here to specific individuals and stories that elevates this work beyond the documentary tone of Topologies, making the human losses more strongly felt.
For Huber’s part, she builds that kind of relationship with the viewer by implicating her own body in her work. She’s a striking figure, a tall biracial woman with thick braids, and whether she is posing naked on a frozen lake in Quebec, fur-clad in the Swiss Alps or dressed in britches and riding boots in Brazil, there’s a powerful drama to her presence that takes the work beyond politics and into art.
Sandra Brewster, DENSE, 2021-2022. Acrylic, drawing and photo-based gel transfer.Power Plant
Still, in the midst of these activist practices, it’s refreshing to encounter evocative murals by the Toronto artist Sandra Brewster, who has used a gel transfer technique to apply two-toned photographic images on both sides of the Power Plant’s central clerestory. This high, narrow and light-filled corridor, leading from one end of the building to the other, is a dramatic space – but not one that is easy to fill artistically. Brewster’s murals – a view of a river in her ancestral Guyana on one side; a mix of trees from Guyanese and Canadian forests on the other – envelope the viewer in a landscape, asking them to look out over the river and up to the trees.
In a sensitive echo of Illingworth’s work, you can reflect on the implications about identity and place: Brewster often uses blurring, creasing and erasures in her photographic work, and here the transfer effect is patchy, leaving small tears in the imagery, as though reproducing the gaps between the second generation and the native land. Or you can simply experience the space, as media meet meditation.
Work by Sasha Huber, Shona Illingworth and Sandra Brewster will be on view in the Power Plant gallery at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre until May 1, 2022.