Disrupting Canadian Myths
BLACK DRONES IN THE HIVE, on view at The Image Centre this fall, is an offering to the public, bestowed by artist Deanna Bowen, winner of the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, and curator Crystal Mowry, who first mounted the show at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) in 2021. As an offering, a provocatively assembled gathering of found objects, it also comes with an appeal: that we thoroughly engage with its teachings and carry them forward.
An empty plinth, paintings from the Group of Seven, an anti-immigration petition, commemorative Uncle Tom’s Cabin plates, abolitionist coins, articles, photos, maps, etchings, and many more objects; it might all seem, at first glance, an eclectic collection. As the threads between them become clearer through intense viewing, it provides evidence of the pervasiveness of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and Black erasure, as well as making manifest the mechanisms through which these oppressive structures have sustained themselves through time. The assemblage turns overwhelming, given, as Bowen puts it, “what it says about how people were so unwanted that they were so callously destroyed.”
Bowen works from the premise that we, her audience, are equally capable of grasping the myriad connections and meanings that the constellations of archival materials she has gathered
