House of B\u00e2by <\/em>is a monumental portrait set in the Great Hall of Toronto\u2019s Union Station, a busy transit nexus in the city\u2019s downtown core, where the work was previously housed for the past two years. When we look at the image, the architecture and d\u00e9cor of the hall appear as they typically do\u2014the barrel-vaulted ceiling anchoring the central plane, classical Corinthian columns featured in the back corner, the ten provincial flags and the Canadian flag hanging from the north-facing wall\u2014and a blurry mass depicts the bustling crowd moving through the space. When we shift our position to observe the work, figures from the crowd come in and out of focus. Made of a lenticular surface, the portrait intentionally conceals and reveals eighteen subjects from specific vantage points. These contemporary subjects, members of the artists\u2019 community portrayed in present-day Toronto, memorialize eighteen Black and Indigenous people enslaved by different generations of the B\u00e2by family during the 1700s and early 1800s in Detroit, Windsor, and Toronto, powerfully embodying their memory and carrying it into the present. Engaging us in a critical process of observation, the work\u2019s lenticular effect troubles the image and asks why these eighteen people, and others who were enslaved, are concealed from the national collective consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Camal-&-Camille_HouseofBa\u0302by\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Camal-&-Camille_HouseofBa\u0302by\"$
Camal & Camille<\/strong>
House of Ba\u0302by,<\/em> 2021, installation views,
University of Waterloo Gallery, 2024.
Photos: Scott Lee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSilence is an action,\u201d attests Turner, and \u201cthose who have power to produce official narratives also have the power to produce official silences.\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Conversation with the artists, February 16, 2022. Turner\u2019s thoughts on silence here are shaped by the ideas of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past<\/em> (1995). For elaboration of Turner\u2019s discussion on silence, see her dissertation \u201cUnsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond\u201d (York University, 2022), accessible online<\/a>.<\/span> She affirms that in order to memorialize enslaved persons who are disremembered, \u201cYou have to go into the silence of the archive to find them.\u201d ^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Conversation with the artists, February 16, 2022.<\/span> In the portrait, most subjects meet our gaze when they come into view, asserting their presence. Some stand alone and others with their family members, and they range across age\u2014some being young children. The work\u2019s legend identifies the first names of the individuals; from left to right, they are: Francois; Marie Louise with her children Rosalie, Louis, Catherine, Augustin, and Basile; Genevieve; Therese and her children Rosalie (Rose) and Leon; Genevieve; Job; Fran\u00e7oise and her daughter Marie; and Jacques Caton, his wife Marie, and their son Jacques. Save for their first names, very little information can be found about them in colonial state archives. In contrast, much is known about slaveholders, and state archives show that these eighteen persons were enslaved by Jacques B\u00e2by dit<\/em> Dup\u00e9ron\u2014a French-Canadian settler fur trader born in Montr\u00e9al who based his operations in the Detroit-Windsor area\u2014and later by his sons Fran\u00e7ois and James \u201cJacques\u201d B\u00e2by. Like their father, Fran\u00e7ois and James held influential roles in Upper Canadian society, both as politicians and James as a legislator. However, public discourse in southern Ontario does not readily link these powerful men of Upper Canadian society to their enslaving practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Slavery was abolished in Canada in 1834, less than two hundred years ago, and yet so little about its realities is reflected in our national institutions and public education systems. Thanks to the relentless work of scholars, artists, and cultural producers, the history of slavery in Canada is continuously being researched and contextualized in relation to current formations of power, evidencing how they link to Canada\u2019s founding as a white colonial settler society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Slavery was abolished in Canada in 1834, less than two hundred years ago, and yet so little about its realities is reflected in our national institutions and public education systems. Thanks to the relentless work of scholars, artists, and cultural producers, the history of slavery in Canada is continuously being researched and contextualized in relation to current formations of power, evidencing how they link to Canada\u2019s founding as a white colonial settler society. Alongside Turner\u2019s scholarship and her and Pirbhai\u2019s cultural production, the research of historian and educator Natasha Henry has greatly contributed to broader knowledge of slavery in Ontario. House of B\u00e2by <\/em>helped to inspire the teacher\u2019s guide she created in 2022, \u201cBeyond the Underground Railroad: A Guide for Teachers on the histories and legacies of enslavement in Ontario,\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - accessible online<\/a>.<\/span> which provides elementary- and secondary-school teachers with critical material on the realities of slavery in Canada and in what is today the province of Ontario. Using Turner and Pirbhai\u2019s work as its foundation, Henry\u2019s guide traces how B\u00e2by dit<\/em> Dup\u00e9ron bequeathed some of the eighteen persons portrayed as inheritances to Fran\u00e7ois and James. Some worked at the family residence in Detroit\u2014Detroit being part of New France until 1760, afterwards becoming British territory\u2014and some laboured at the farm property in Windsor that Fran\u00e7ois eventually took over. James took up residence in Toronto in 1815\u2014in what is today the affluent Baby Point neighbourhood next to the Humber River\u2014where he continued to enslave some of these individuals and others. As a whole, Henry\u2019s guide collates omissions of slavery in the way that historical narratives of Ontario are taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reflecting on art, race, and portraiture in her book Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling<\/em>, the author Esi Edugyan writes, \u201cWhen we sideline or hide away images of certain people, what we are cutting ourselves off from is some sense of their possible history and daily lives, their humanity. The lingering fascination of art, its power, lies in our ability to make whole what is lost, through dreaming. A fixed image can be an entire life, a flowing story.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling <\/em>(Toronto: House of Anansi, 2021), 42.<\/span> Amongst the silences of the archives and the crumbling myth of Canada\u2019s white benevolence, House of B\u00e2by<\/em> reclaims the humanity of these eighteen persons. Disrupting official narratives of Canadian history, the work honours their lives through the power of portraiture, the contemporary subjects \u201cinhabiting that memory to bring it alive,\u201d as Turner puts it. Gathered under the barrel-vaulted ceiling in Union Station, the composition echoes Raphael\u2019s School of Athens<\/em> (1509\u201311), a renowned fresco portrait of Western intellectuals across time. Here, the eighteen subjects are given the honour of a portrait and reimagined in the twenty-first century as free members of society, allowing us to see them in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Camal-&-Camille_Rocks\"$
Camal & Camille<\/strong>
Rocks (untitled 1-9),<\/em> 2021-23, installation view,
University of Waterloo Gallery, 2024.
Photo: Scott Lee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In Rocks<\/em>, time flows even further into the past and circles back into the present. Here, Turner and Pirbhai continue a journey started in Turner\u2019s solo work Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland <\/em>(2019), in which an Afronaut\u2014a time-traveller from the future whose ancestors are the Dogon people of Mali\u2014considers the history of transatlantic slavery from the perspective of ballast rocks, which were used to weigh down slave ships built on Canada\u2019s east coast as they sailed to the west coast of Africa. When the ships arrived at their destination, the rocks were unloaded on shore and replaced with enslaved persons, themselves considered nonhuman in the slave trade. Whereas the Afronaut comes to us from the future, Rocks<\/em> portrays contemporary Black subjects venerating these ballast stones in the present. They engage with them through various gestures performing activities in their everyday lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In one portrait, a man plays the rock as if it were a drum; in the next, a young child is learning to do the same. One photograph shows a woman with a stone pressed to her ear as if it were a headphone, her eyes closed as she listens intently. Yet another depicts a person carrying the stone as a backpack. A large rock, which was found by Pirbhai at a Toronto beach on the shore of Lake Ontario, occupies a plinth at the centre of the installation. Inspired by the idea that all rocks carry stories, Turner and Pirbhai posit the rocks in the exhibition not as archives in the colonial sense\u2014lifeless and restricted repositories\u2014but as living conveyors of memory and story. A strong sense of continuity flows throughout the series, as sitters from different generations engage with the rocks. They venerate the wisdom of the stones and carry these legacies in their present lives. Joy and freedom resonate throughout the portraits, as grief for all that has been lost morphs into a fierce celebration of ancestral continuity and community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Camal-&-Camille_Rocks\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Camal-&-Camille_Rocks\"$
Camal & Camille<\/strong>
Rocks (untitled 1-9),<\/em> 2021-23, installation views,
University of Waterloo Gallery, 2024.
Photos: Scott Lee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Life is constantly in motion\u2014rocks just as much as humans, albeit on different perceivable time scales, as rocks outlive human ages. Through this lens of deep time, Turner and Pirbhai connect lifetimes across centuries, utilizing portraiture to honour the memory of those made unfree. In both House of B\u00e2by <\/em>and Rocks, <\/em>they transform the medium into a living conduit of remembrance and a way to change how we tell stories about the past and, ultimately, the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Val\u00e9rie Frappier is a white Franco-Ontarian settler born in Waterloo, raised in Aurora, Ontario, and currently based in Halifax in Mi\u2019kma\u2019ki. She is a cultural worker and writer who researches how artists utilize embodied creative practice as a tool in understanding relationships with place. <\/p>\n
Camal Pirbhai, Camille Turner, Val\u00e9rie Frappier<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"University of Waterloo Art Gallery<\/strong>
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