Textile Museum of Canada x Riverdale Hub Textile Tour
ONLINE ON ZOOM
FREE
Join us for a virtual gallery hop! Participants will join a guided visit of both Intricacies of the Gaze — an exhibition at Riverdale Hub featuring the work of eva birhanu and Khadijah Morley, and Chase — an exhibition of work by Jagdeep Raina at the Textile Museum of Canada. In both exhibitions, the engaged artists work to deconstruct rigid understandings of diasporic and racialized experiences.
The tours will be held as part of one virtual event, led by textile artist and educator Denise Maroney for the Textile Museum of Canada and Riverdale Hub’s Curator of Exhibitions and Programs Ignazio Nicastro.
Intricacies of the Gaze
As an invitation to introspection, Intricacies of the Gaze explores and preserves two perspectives of Black womanhood. Together, eva birhanu and Khadijah Morley use their practices to expand on their diasporic experiences to engage with the multiplicity of Blackness through a transfusion of textiles and print media. Here the two artists present work that contends with the duality of their self-perception: how the world views them and how they view themselves. As viewers move from one artist to the next, they will note how both birhanu and Morley narrate the elements of their identity that are both constructed and critiqued by the gazes of the world around them. It visually speaks to the act of watching while being watched. Through iconography and illustrative narratives of racial identity, Intricacies of the Gaze utilizes the synergy of birhanu and Morley to construct a space that allows for conversation on Black womanhood and acts as an extension to ideologies well known to Black and Black biracial women.
Jagdeep Raina: Chase
Featuring the work of Jagdeep Raina, Chase is a poetic exploration of the interplay of memory and migration, and of how both are mapped onto everyday landscapes. Raised and currently based in Guelph, Raina shares stories of the Sikh diaspora, drawing upon personal records and those of his family who were among the migration to southern Ontario in the 1960s, as well as oral and archival histories of wider pioneering Kashmiri and Punjabi Sikh diasporic communities. Rendering these narratives cinematically as embroidered tapestries as well as works on paper, Raina evokes the textured local and transnational geographies of longing and belonging that emerge in the quest to establish home in terrain that is unsettlingly remote.
eva birhanu is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator working in Mohkinstis (Calgary, Alberta) on Treaty 7 Territory. Born in Canada to immigrant parents from Denmark and Ethiopia, she focuses on identity and biraciality in her work. eva’s practice involves mediums of fibre and sculpture, auto-ethnographically exploring exoticism, objectification and more recently ally performativity. In her practice, eva often incorporates iconography of her own racial identity as a way to portray micro aggressions felt by biracial and Black women.
Khadijah Morley (she/her) is a Tkaronto (Toronto) based artist with a BFA in Drawing and Painting, and minor in Printmaking from OCAD University. Through the process of etching and relief printing, Khadijah explores the complexities of Black womanhood through an autobiographical lens. She often uses self-portraiture to deconstruct the fallacy of a Black monolithic experience. She hopes that her subject matter serves to expand discourse surrounding Black subjectivity. Khadijah’s work invokes notions of hooks’ oppositional gaze and Du Bois’ double consciousness.
Jagdeep Raina (b. 1991, Guelph, Ontario, Canada) received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Grice Bench, Los Angeles; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; and the Art Gallery of Guelph. Raina’s work has been included in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; RISD Museum of Art, Providence; and the Rubin Museum of Art, New York. In 2016, he was included in the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Raina is a 2019 recipient of the Textile Museum of Canada’s Melissa Levin Emerging Artist Award, and a 2020 recipient of the prestigious Sobey Art Award in Canada.
Become a Member of the Textile Museum Today
And enjoy unlimited free entry to all the Textile Museum's exhibitions, plus much more.
Join Today