Outgraced

Karen Miranda Augustine

Opening Reception: Friday June 20th at 7 - 9 PM

Exhibition runs June 20 - July 19, 2014

Curated by Rachel Gorman

Artist Talk Saturday July 5th, 2-4pm

Outgraced's richly textured icons unite the sexual, the soul wound, and the sublime in ways that are deeply rooted in Indigenous and West African spirituality to meditate on violence and harm, grief and serenity, exaltation and delight.

Augustines work is a reconfiguration of representations of female sexuality through an aesthetic process of disidentification. Presenting us with an alternative historiography, and gesturing toward a process of reparation, Augustine turns liberal feminist and queer historiographies on their head through a meticulous process of re-contextualization.

BIOGRAPHIES

Karen Miranda Augustine is a Canadian artist, writer and videomaker whose works have exhibited in Canada, the US, Scotland, and Haiti at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince. She has been published and cited in several books and publications, including Caribbean InTransit Arts Journal, The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts Cleis Press and The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century Columbia University Press. Formerly, she was the founding editor of At the Crossroads: A Journal for Women Artists of African Descent 1992-97, editor of the now defunct MIX: independent art & culture magazine, beloved CKLN 88.1 FM radio host of BASS: Black Afrikan Sistuhs of Soul 1992-2003, and a poet who had opened for Philadephia recording artist Ursula Rucker, writer Dionne Brand, and dub poet Lillian Allen. In 2004, she recorded "Sapphire" for the jazz/poetry compilation The New World Reveal-a-Solution Urbanicity Recordings, produced by Chicago DJ Shannon Harris. Three years later, her piece Miranda and Child RaRa Rah was awarded third place at the CRUX juried exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia. Karen Miranda's creative projects ride on the confluence of pop culture, spirituality and the underground. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University.

Rachel Gorman is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University, with a background in dance theatre and performance art. Since receiving her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005 with a dissertation on cultural production, disability, and class consciousness, she has held a Lectureship at the Women and Gender Studies Institute of the University of Toronto, and Fellowships at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University at Buffalo. She has worked on the programming committee at A Space and the editorial committee of Fuse Magazine. She has two decades of experience in anti-occupation and anti-violence organizing.