Karice Mitchell’s photo-based practice uses found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to identity, resistance, adornment, and the representation of the Black female body in Western visual culture and erotica. By appropriating imagery from archival issues of the racy magazine Players (1973–2005), she combines visual strategies such as scanning and cropping to recontextualize this imagery detached from the White gaze and patriarchy.
Mitchell celebrates the countless ways Black women represent themselves, for themselves, through adornment as a form of personalized self-expression, identity, and self-care – often emphasizing Black cultural signifiers such as long artificial nails, jewelry, and melanated skin. Mitchell reasserts their agency, as well as her own, by denying the opportunity for the image to be read whole, which creates a tension between image and viewer. For the 2024 Capture Photography Festival, Mitchell drew inspiration from writer and curator Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) to produce a series of larger-than-life billboards. In a rather poetic yet powerful turn of events, what originated as a single proposed site-specific installation for the façade of the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation, evolved into a series of five activations across the cities of Vancouver and North Vancouver.
There is a certain continuity between Mitchell’s practice and that of other Black women artists, namely Lorna Simpson, whose collage work draws on material sourced from Black-centric publications such as the magazines Ebony (1945–) and Jet (print 1951–2014; digital 2014–), and Mickalene Thomas, whose collage portraits depict Black women unapologetically. Their work seeks to reimagine the possibilities of Black womanhood and sexuality.
For her Capture commission, Mitchell took cues from previous projects. Her first public art installation titled take care (2021–22) with Hamilton Artists Inc., which showcased a cropped image sourced from a vintage publication with the words “take care” printed atop, was followed by an artist residency with the Burrard Arts Foundation in 2023. It was during this time that the artist began developing a new visual narrative in her work by restaging these images using her own body. Mitchell sought to combine these concepts, through a different lens, in what has become a self-referential exploration.
Guided by one of Russell’s central arguments, which proposes that in order to accept alternative ways of being one must embrace the notion of “glitch” as failure and refusal, Mitchell adopts a process of refusal as it relates to the legibility of an image.1 By setting the parameters within which her body is to be consumed by the public, achieved through cropping and photographic alterations, the site-specific image would have been further distorted from its original form when mounted to the tile-like façade of the Dal Grauer Substation in downtown Vancouver – a site that has housed installations commissioned by Capture annually since 2015. Unfortunately, this year, the proposed project was denied.
It is often the tension created between artwork and viewer that results in questioning its value and palatability in a public context. Rather than embracing a level of discomfort that is crucial to expanding our knowledge and growth, the human instinct rejects it. But how does an artist reclaim that space? As a Black woman, there is an additional layer of negotiation at play when navigating these spaces in a racialized body – a constant mediation of self when it comes to power dynamics within institutionalized contexts and the unspoken labour that this entails.
This rejection presented an opportunity to further explore the notion of “glitch” as a conceptual framework that is celebrated as a vehicle or passageway of refusal, and reclaim a moment of censorship through heightened visibility by instead presenting her work on five billboards in a project titled Will to adorn.2 This exemplifies Mitchell’s consistent interest in granting her work permission and authority to take up space in more ways than one and how she embraces ways to “create through rupture” while situating the Black femme body as a site(s) of resistance.3
Located at the south end of The Polygon Gallery, facing Vancouver and Lonsdale Quay, visitors encounter Mitchell’s Cates Deck installation, becoming and unbecoming (working title), a separate work from the Will to adorn series. By exhibiting this image that was deemed problematic at its original site, Mitchell ensures public access to her work, while also revealing the source image for the accompanying body of work.
The second site hosts work from the Will to adorn series at E Cordova St and Campbell Ave. An enlargement of a cropped image of fingers adorned with long red acrylic nails, a pearl-like necklace interlaced between them, and glimpses of black satin fabric against brown skin, I is where this series’s “glitch” finds its genesis. By isolating these forms of adornment, the artist calls into question the politics they perform. For instance, hands, often associated with labour, when intersected with artificial nails that are culturally coded within conversations around Black female identity and sexuality, engage new meanings relating to freedom and identity, and gesture as a means to extend invitation or initiate intimacy. This “full” image is only offered at one site.
At a third site, roughly 4 kilometres away at Davie St and Bute St in Vancouver’s West End, Mitchell fragments the images II and III from the Will to adorn series across two intersecting billboards. Zoomed in closer than I, the images begin to lose their legibility. While one billboard still includes references to its whole (pearls, skin, nails), the other isolates skin and pieces of the strand of pearls – abstracting her presence and the image further. A fourth site, in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver at Yukon St and W 8th Ave, offers another translation of the deconstructed image, wherein a few pearls are carefully woven between two fingers, one of which is cut off by the frame. Only a single red nail can be read in full.
While she references the image’s whole at each site, Mitchell’s use of aesthetic tools as a method to reclaim space also highlights the labour that is often required of Black women and the conditions under which femininity, sexuality, and Blackness are dictated within White capitalist and patriarchal societies. Under this current system, her body will always be implicated in these grey areas. This labour is mirrored in what is required of the public in order to engage with the project as a whole – spanning 3 to 15 kilometres distance from one another.
Will to adorn presents an amalgamation of a number of works and concerns the artist has explored to date and demonstrates the ways in which her practice continues to evolve. Although she is referencing an image that only a handful of people have seen, Mitchell immerses herself in the potential that exists through an act of refusal. Recalling Russell’s hope of her manifesto being adopted as a strategic tool in addressing issues around Black bodies, femme bodies, and queer bodies, Mitchell’s use of her own body in her images as a tool of experimentation to negotiate issues of autonomy gives way for new possibilities of being and becoming.4
There is a raw power in embracing and building new realities no longer predicated on binary systems. In doing so, she allows her practice to take on a new responsibility in redefining what is deemed “acceptable” for public display and extends that invitation to non-art audiences, in public spaces, thus positioning her work with a greater sense of purpose. As glitch feminists, “we will take up space, and break this world, making new ones.”5
Endnotes:
1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso Books, 2020), 17–37.
2. Conversation with the artist, November 15, 2023.
3. Russell, 7.
4. Ben Davis, “‘I Say Tear It All Down’: Curator Legacy Russell on How ‘Glitch Feminism’ Can Be a Tool to Radically Reimagine the World,” Art Net News, September 28, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/legacy-russell-glitch-feminism-a-manifesto-1910221.
5. Russell, 145.
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