When work is segregated under a blanket term such as \u201cculturally specific,\u201d artists of visible or language minorities are typically encouraged and expected<\/em> to create work that fits under this designation. (This can happen both intentionally and unintentionally.) How is an artist to provide a voice when consistently categorized as Other, as apart from the Western hegemonic culture? This is the postcolonial dilemma of culturally specific work that many immigrants and ethnically diverse artists attempt to divert (or even tackle directly).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Legislatively, Canada is multicultural;3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - The Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988) states that \u201cevery individual is equal before and under the law.\u2009.\u2009. and has the freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief, opinion, expression, peaceful assembly and association,\u201d and asserts that \u201cthe Constitution of Canada recognizes the importance of preserving and enhancing the multicultural heritage of Canadians.\u201d Jack Jedwab, \u201cMulticulturalism: Definition and Policy and Legislative Framework,\u201d in Canadian Diversity<\/em> 5, no. 2 (Spring 2006), 3\u200a\u2013\u200a5.<\/span> however, in practice, multicultural communities must still integrate themselves into the established vision of what Canada essentially is<\/em>: a nation founded on Western European ideals of modernism, colonialism, and conformity. Postcolonial scholar Igor Maver indicates that in addition to multiculturalism, which many agree to be ineffectual,4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - To read more on the limitations of multiculturalism in Canada, see Himani Bannerji, \u201cOn the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of \u2018Canada,\u2019\u201d in his The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender<\/em> (Toronto: Canadian Scholars\u2019 Press, 2000), 87\u2013\u200a124.<\/span> critical concepts utilized to combat the effects of colonialism include \u201cpolyvocality, hybridity, and (post-colonial) mimicry.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Igor Maver, \u201cNew Diasporic Literature in a Post-ethnic Transcultural Canada,\u201d in Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue<\/em>, eds. Diana Brydon and Marta Dvor\u00e1k (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, March 2012), accessed January 28, 2012, myuminfo.umanitoba.ca\/Documents\/2142\/MaverI.pdf<\/em>.<\/span> An artist who immigrated to Canada as a child, Santos attempts to utilize precisely these techniques to counter the expectations of thorough integration while also ultimately planting herself in Canada. By employing hybridity, polyvocality, and mimesis, Santos is able to speak of her ghosts while never fully segregating herself into a culturally specific category. Writing on the hazards of curating from a position within cultural-specificity, which is to say, insubalternity, Alice Jim advocates and investigates working with<\/em> subalternity6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Alice Ming Wai Jim, ed., \u201cRearranging Desires: Curating the Other,\u201d in Rearranging Desires<\/em>, exhibition catalogue (Montr\u00e9al: Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art; Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, Concordia University, 2008), 2.<\/span> as a way to \u201cactivate resistance against the dominant historiography\u2019s \u2018apparatus\u2019 both conceptually and formally.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as quoted in Jim, \u201cRearranging Desires,\u201d 2.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the work of Santos is conceptually and formally tackling issues of subalternity and the grounding (or rooting) of oneself. In Personal Mythologies <\/em>(2012), an exhibition curated by Zo\u00eb Chan displaying the work of Marigold Santos and Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo at Montr\u00e9al, arts interculturels (MAI), Santos showcases imagery that is deliberately imprecise yet fundamentally accessible, encouraging viewers to make their own associations and interpretations. This work comes from her own remembrances and recollections while accepting and simulating outside translations from said imagery. In the piece Secret Signals 1<\/em> (2011), Santos employs hybridity through theoretical and aesthetic means, mixing together folk tales passed down from generation to generation, mysticism, and childhood games. The amalgamation of personal and broader elements in Santos\u2019s work speaks to the universality as well as the particularity that art can offer its viewers\u200a\u2014\u200acommunicating to a vast audience rather than a culturally specific viewership. Santos writes, \u201cIn many ways there is some cultural specificity [in my work], however, I am not interested in boundaries that limit the work, and instead prefer to think about hybridities between cultures, ideas, memories, theories [with elements] of ambiguity and open-endedness.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Marigold Santos, personal email correspondence with the author, January 29, 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Secret Signals 1<\/em> depicts a woman making hand signals with severed limbs. Her right hand is held upside down against her face with the thumb and index finger forming a circle around her eye; her left hand hangs detached from her arm while another severed hand makes the shape of a \u201cC\u201d around her left ear. Underneath her sheer garments is a body made up of different elements: feathers, chains, ropes, bandages, and various textiles. The woman herself is a hybrid of multiple components; components whose references are not culturally specific but, in different ways, relatable and associative for a broad spectrum of the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In accepting and corroborating diverse translations of her work, Santos employs polyvocality. Established through the open interpretations of her audience, polyvocality is also, significantly, utilized through the varying influences embedded in her images. There exist multiple perspectives and voices coming through her images, which, in turn, evade the trap of merely representing a stereotyped version of what a culture can represent. In other words, Santos does not \u201cplay the Other,\u201d a phrase Olu Oguibe uses to describe the occurrence of culturally specific artists adopting the myths and \u201ccorpus of signs\u201d put upon those who show difference.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Olu Oguibe, \u201cPlay me the \u2018Other\u2019: Colonialist Determinism and the Postcolonial Predicament,\u201d in The Culture Game<\/em> (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 20.<\/span> Using references or voices, such as folk tales, childhood games, textiles, and natural Canadian anatomy (such as the Canadian Rockies, prairie fields, and weather systems) as well as prompting ambiguous, non-linear, fragmented articulations, Santos\u2019s imagery does not fit within a definite Other.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Marigold Santos, statement on haunted \/ talisman<\/em>, accessed January 28, 2012, http:\/\/marigoldsantos.com\/MARIGOLD_SANTOS\/h_t__statement.html.<\/span> The hand signals illustrated in Secret Signals<\/em> 1<\/em> come from memories of games Santos played as a child, yet she also states that the silent language \u201ctalks about portals being opened, invitations perhaps, and\/or conversations with multiple selves.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Santos, personal email correspondence with the author.<\/span> The term \u201cvariety\u201d becomes a key designation in discussing Santos\u2019s work: she advocates art from a variety of influences, for a variety of publics, with the hope of instigating a variety of conversations with a variety of selves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As illustrated through the surreal quality of Secret Signals 1<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200athe severed limbs, the visual morphing of the sheer fabric and skin so that one is not sure what is clothing and what is the underlying body\u200a\u2014\u200amyth is very clearly embedded in the work of Santos. Santos creates her own fictional reality to interpret her physical and inner reality. Yet we must be clear, she does not enact the enforced myth-making described by Oguibe. Discussing the Togolese artist William Wilson, Oguibe writes that \u201cbecause his difference is more a construct than a truth, he is compelled to invent a myth of Otherness.\u201d Oguibe uses the example of Wilson, an artist who was compelled and expected (by the international art market) to produce culturally specific \u201cAfrican\u201d art, to point to the logical, yet detrimental, strategies used by \u201cpost\u201d colonial artists who do not adhere to the Western European prototype.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Oguibe, \u201cPlay me the \u2018Other,\u2019\u201d 20.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Santos slyly mimics the mythic quality commonly found in culturally diverse work and shifts away from a constructed <\/em>myth\u200a\u2014\u200aone created by others and imposed upon the Other\u200a\u2014\u200ainto a myth that is about her personally: her culture and family, her experience of being uprooted and subsequently grounding herself in her new reality. Just as the title of the exhibition states, Santos\u2019s work is about personal mythologies as she mimics the technique used by the hegemonic power to destabilize and marginalize minorities, thereby creating a mythic identity. This use of mimesis acknowledges the history of Canada and the persistence of discrimination while also taking command in creating Santos\u2019s own identity as opposed to having an identity put upon her. It should be noted that the female figure in Secret Signals 1<\/em> does not show evidence of any discernable skin tone: her skin is grey with no recognizably ethnic facial features. This mythological figure is not bound by ethnicity or race: she is visually outside our purview of subalternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Personal Mythologies<\/em> Santos presents works that are arresting in their surrealist imagery; works that invite the viewer closer, only to strike with notions of displacement, rootedness, and myth-making. In mythologizing her past and present, Santos avoids playing the Other through her use of critical postcolonial tools such as hybridity, polyvocality, and mimicry, and as such, avoids creating ghettoized culturally specific work. Ambiguousness in Santos\u2019s images results in evading outside identification while concurrently addressing social constructs and issues of![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/76_JC01_Potle_Santos_Secret-Signals-3-scaled.jpg\")
photos : Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/76_JC01_Potle_Santos_Secret-Signals-scaled.jpg\")
photos : Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
marginalization.<\/p>\n