CodesWitcher: Lisa Mayes, MFA Intermedia

CodesWitcher: Lisa Mayes, MFA Intermedia

November 21 - December 16, 2023

FAB Gallery, Main Floor

Reception

University of Alberta faculty, staff, students and invited guests
Thursday November 23,  2023 | 7-9 pm | FAB Gallery

About the Show

In this autoethnographic exhibition, CodesWitcher, I am interested in representing myself as a black body with the intersectionality of Acadian, African American, Muscogee Creek, Irish and Scottish heritage. This is an act of reclamation through a conceptual construction of identity achieved through excavating and interrogating personal archives as I follow the colonial and postcolonial diasporic displacement trajectory within North American narratives. The archives include ancestors enslaved in transatlantic slavery, indentured and displaced through Highland Clearances, and a few who chose their migrations. 

The foundational work comprises research and literature. Site-specific research, artist residencies, and intense language lessons between Ireland, France, Scotland and The United States allowed for the plotting of conceptual maps to guide me to where to retrieve footage and documentation and to confirm lineages. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s (1932-2014) essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse and sociologist W.E.B Du Bois's term “double consciousness” from The Souls of Black Folk provided a theoretical structure. Combined, the research and literature allow the viewer to decode/interpret cultural signifiers and “code-switching” by offering generous modalities of visual and written languages to facilitate a better understanding of intersectional cultural and conceptual maps.

Emerging from the foundation work is the intentionality of CodesWitcher, a multimedia installation of a moving/still/audio representation of the past and present encoded with different conceptual maps of culture to allow participants to encounter representation intersectionality within a third space. From within, the viewer's body is transported into the virtual space of my motherland(s). At the same time, mother and daughter portraits speak of the inheritance of hybrid consciousnesses arriving from the near past. Anchoring the space are folkloric sculptures harkening to Irish and African-American myths. Simultaneously, the landscapes of my homelands offer an imagined ancestor's perspective.

About the Artist

Currently an Intermedia graduate student at the University of Alberta, Art & Design, Lisa Mayes holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art Education from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

As an intermedia artist, Mayes draws from her personal experiences and her interest in languages, marketing and psychology education. Much of her work investigates particular modes or ways in which something exists or is experienced or expressed while dealing with topics about global migration, sociopolitical diasporic identities, and the renegotiation of social and structural constraints created by dominant colonial cultures.

Mayes's work has been exhibited nationally, in Edmonton, Vancouver, and Montreal, at the Royal Alberta Museum, Alberta Art Gallery, Scott Gallery and Latitude 53.

 

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