Artist Presentations: Liss Platt & Deanna Bowen


LISS PLATT – Screening of works:  March 18, 2:30 pm

Liss Platt an associate Professor in the Department of Communications Studies and Multimedia will screen a selection of works on Wednesday March 18th in the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work explores the family as a site of identity formation.

For nearly 20 years Platt has been making films and videos that revolve around an exploration of the complex processes by which individuals become constituted as subjects.Throughout her film/video practice, personal experience has served as a jumping off point – a way to engage with the impact of culture, representation, and lived experience on her knowledge and perception of herself as a social being.

The works are presented in collaboration with the Graduate Program in Gender Studies and Feminist Research at McMaster University, and English & Cultural Studies.

DEANNA BOWEN – Artist’s Talk:  March 19, 12:30 pm

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based video installation and performance artist, whose work combines personal autobiography and archival research to raise questions about the silences and gaps in familial and collective histories of slavery, racism, and migration. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and film festivals and, in the spring of 2013, she curated a solo show at The Art Gallery of York University about the Ku Klux Klan and its migration to Canada.

Deanna Bowen’s artwork sum of the parts: what can be named, 2010 is a centrepiece of the exhibition This is Me, This is Also Me, on view at the Museum until March 21. In the eighteen minute video, Bowen recounts the ‘disremembered’ journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815. It is a performed oral history specially commissioned by VTape.