(NOTE: Photo credit for Buseje Bailey's portrait: Photo: Anita Martinez)
Artist's Statement
I create art to communicate ideas, thoughts, and/or feelings. I use a variety of techniques and materials to communicate these ideas. Body Politics is an intervention, and while it is intervening it is also trying to free itself from its historical contexts of theoretical and political constructs. The postmodern rhetoric of racial/cultural/ identity has become a purely academic discourse. This work is a personal visual representation as it relates to the dialectic of race, gender, sexuality and location within mainstream art practices. In this work I explore what it is 'to be'. I follow in the footsteps of those sisters and brothers who informed and inspire my practice. Blood is a metaphor for 'black life', especially black women's lives but mostly my life. It's about not having choices, being trapped in stereotypes - or if there are choices, it is about having the choice to choose from a million of the same. Blood is about our rage -all women's rage -about being made to feel unclean in bleeding, about rape - to wash the experience away. It is not about just one individual against a woman, but society's unwitting abuse against us all. But mostly it is my search for a unique way to make my art.
Biographical Notes
Buseje Bailey works across a variety of media, including painting, photography, video, mixed media and sculptural installation. She earned her BFA at York University and her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (1992). She also has a Diploma in Communications: Publishing (Centennial College). In 1992 she participated in the artists' residency on "Race and the Body Politic" at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she produced the videotape Blood. Bailey's work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Most of her professional art career has focused on the hybridity of her art practice in relation to her African-Jamaican-Canadian experience and identity. In addition to her artwork, she delivers courses on African Art in the diaspora and works on community-based women's projects.
Works in the exhibition
Dimensions are in centimetres, height precedes width. All works are in the collections of the artists.
slide installation
dimensions vary
videotape 5:54 mins