streets of New York and Toronto. These candid portrayals emit a dynamic energy, capturing the spirit of individuals who may be overlooked or disregarded within the urban landscape, including the homeless. Through her camera lens, these subjects have the opportunity to look back. Installing the range of images into the shape of a crucifix, the work is a powerful statement on marginalization and atonement. Both Ella Cooper and Anthony Gebrehiwot assert the Black female body within and outside of time and space. Responding to the absence and erasure of African Canadian women within visual constructs of nationhood/landscape, Ella’s photography and video series, Body Land Identity, evolved from workshops the artist developed with a range of intergenerational women from major Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. Responding to the question “How do you want to be seen and celebrated in the world?” both the artist and the participants created images as embodied and agentive subjects within multiple locales and seasons, where land, Ella explains, “served as a metaphorical representation of national identity, dominant society, Canadian visual culture, First Nations territories and the place of Black women within it.” The series is presented as three components. The artist’s individual prints of the named women, some created in black and white, others in colour, their bared shoulders and expressive faces directly engage the viewer, while
others look away, confident to destabilize the gaze and claim space on their own terms. The work includes a short colour video that shows several of the women standing in an outdoor landscape. Staring out at the viewer, they all face forward positioned in an assertive stance replicating a V-formation, the symmetric flight patterns seen with migratory birds, a nod to notions of migration and movements of peoples throughout the diaspora as well as to subjectivities impacted by displacement. Finally, the series includes a compilation of images taken by the women themselves, an affirmation of their material realities and desires to make and remake their identities within geographical space. Anthony’s series Imana situates his models totally outside of the landscape and into intergalactic space. Here he presents creative women, mainly artists as Afro-futuristic deities, their highly individualized and empowered representations suggest an implicit collaboration between artist and sitter. Jah Grey’s and Yannick Anton’s respective practices challenge the normative assumptions that surround racialized and gendered bodies, celebrating their subjects’ capacities for self-expression as unifying freedom. Kara Springer’s large scale photo-diptych, Ana and Andre are conceptually charged works that restage the subjective and unsettle identifications, refuting the spectacular function of the 9