Future Forwards looks toward emerging and prominent Black artists in the Edmonton, Montréal, and Toronto communities to showcase diverse perspectives and exemplary skill. SNAP has commissioned four new limited edition prints by artists Anna Jane McIntyre, Braxton Garneau, Raneece Buddan, and Khadijah Morley as part of this great new project.
2022 marks SNAP’s 40th anniversary and the organization’s record of commissioning print editions from Black Artists is sorely lacking. SNAP is dedicated to begin correcting this significant gap during its 40th anniversary year. This project will look forward to a future of fostering and supporting projects from previously underrepresented artists.
This limited edition of 10 prints per artist will be available for purchase beginning in August 2022, in conjunction with our 40th Anniversary Exhibition. The proceeds from this portfolio contribute to our fundraising efforts on behalf of SNAP’s 40th Anniversary.
Stay tuned for a video series documenting the artists’ printing processes!
This programming is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
“My current practice combines a variety of harvested and hand-processed materials with printmaking, painting, and installation to create portraits, shrines, and corporeal forms. These materials often share inextricable colonial histories and significant cultural ties to those who’ve spent generations in close proximity to them. Exploring the materiality of culture, I mine my own Caribbean heritage to charge my practice with the essences of animism and masquerade that swirl within Trinidad and Tobago. I aim to merge classical aesthetics and double entendre to cultivate a visual language steeped in burlesque and iconoclasm. Through my practice I explore my own questions of identity as well as it influences and limitations within a Canadian society.
This edition was an opportunity for me to step away from my material focused practice to explore drypoint and mezzotint, both of which were techniques I had not previously worked with. I was very much inspired by the symbolism in Albrecht Dürer’s engravings and other theological artworks from the 15th century.”
Anna Jane McIntyre is a visual artist-parent with a practice combining shape-shifting, mark-making, thinking, doing, looking, breathing, $5-improv-benevolent-capitalism and microactivism. Anna’s work investigates how people perceive, create and maintain their notions-of-self, belonging and culture through behaviour and visual cues.
Projects may incorporate giant emojis, feminist-foosball-tables, community workshops, parade floats, commercial signage, thinking forests, urban ecology forest-school cahiers prioritising BIPOC kids, time-travelling-soundscapes-mapping-abstract-narratives, Speaker’s corners, love-letter-services and homages-for-the-forgotten.
Anna’s projects are an expression of Afropresentism that combine her cultural influences (Trinidadian, British, adoptive-Canadian) through the juxtaposition of familiar materials in novel contexts. Her work acknowledges the past and present, imagining a surreal dream of what is to come.
Raneece Buddan is a Jamaican artist who moved to Alberta in 2015. She completed her BFA in Art and Design with Distinction at the University of Alberta in 2020. In her work, she focuses on her cultural identity as a Jamaican woman of Afro and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. She shows the beautiful merging of these cultures as well as the bias and discomfort she felt around her hair and skin tone from childhood to her teens. This is depicted in her work by replacing her skin tone with fabrics meant to represent each ethnicity and incorporating synthetic hair. Her process is based on material exploration and finding figures within the wood grains and mounds of clay. Her primary mediums are oil painting, woodworking and ceramics.
This series of prints was inspired by Raneece’s new research on textiles in Nigeria and Southern India. Fabric is a major component in her work and how she chooses to explore and express my cultural identity. She felt it was time she learned more about her ancestry based on textiles in specific regions, how they’re made and how she may be able to incorporate them more authentically into her work. For now, she focused specifically on Akwete, a cloth woven in the Noloki town of Akwete in Nigeria and the Machilipatnam Kalamkari from Andhra Pradesh, Southern India, a block printed cloth with hand-painted intricate details. Her goal was to combine these two patterns as well as the techniques of the Kalamkari into one. She used silkscreen to translate the weavings of the Akwete and block printing and hand printing for the Kalamkari.
While creating these patterns her goal was not to copy the examples presented but, to be inspired by them to make her own fusion, a self-portrait. While researching the Akwete cloth she learnt it was important to not copy designs because they are believed to be from God, and it dies with the owner. She chose to do a more Akpuka (vibrant) pattern with the “geometric flower” and “v” patterns. For the Kalamkari border, she did a floral design focusing more on the process of carving the rubber blocks for printing, learning how to block print and hand painting the gold flowers. The process was difficult and a learning curve but necessary in elevating her practice and learning more about her ancestry and self.
For this project, Raneece also hand-dyed cotton muslin to be even more involved in the process.
Khadijah Morley (she/her) is a Tkaronto (Toronto) based artist and educator 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. Her work has been featured on CBC arts and she is currently a recipient of the Kala Fellowship at the Kala Arts Institute in Berkeley, California.
“A silhouetted figure emerges from the depths of stormy waters. Amidst crashing waves, they remain still. Their gaze is unwavering, disposition unclear…
Sharing the title of Christina Sharpe’s book “In the Wake” (2022) this work converses with Sharpe’s theories regarding Black contemporary life in the diaspora.
Particularly, I have drawn on Sharpe’s metaphorical use of ‘wake’ and ‘weather’. Sharpe expands their definitions to illustrate the afterlives/reverberations of the transatlantic slave trade. Blackness thus exists within the ‘wake’ of “slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding”, which is to “occupy and to be occupied by [its] continuous and changing present” (13–14). The ‘weather’ is not a singular event, rather it is all encompassing climate. It is “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.” (104)
Like Sharpe, I have no interest in providing answers. Instead, I am attempting to explore a visual language to express a past that is continuously present and roils the everyday of Black lives.”