MAKING IT REAL
MICHÈLE PEARSON CLARKE KNOWS HEAVY EMOTIONS. Grief, for instance, is a theme that has wound its way through her work, most explicitly 2015’s still-video installation, “Parade of Champions,” which confronted queer, Black grief in the face of losing a parent.
“Muscle Memory,” Clarke’s first major solo exhibit currently on at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, deals with the themes of loss, fear, and the vulnerability of being masculine in a Black, queer, female body. It consists of a collaborative video installation, “Quantum Choir,” and an accompanying self-portrait series, “The Animal Seems to Be Moving.”
“The older I get, the more comfortable I get with myself,” says Clarke. “Doing a project like this and leaning into that vulnerability is not something that I think I would have been ready to do earlier, but I’m at a stage now where it becomes possible.”
Clarke is referring to the extensive creative process behind “Quantum Choir,” a four-channel video and sound installation in a free-standing structure in the middle of the gallery. The piece is about the vulnerability and precarity inherent in queer-female masculinity, channelled through a video presentation documenting the outcome of a process of four strangers learning how to sing together.
However, her words could also be referencing any of the projects she has created over the course of her career.
“All of my work involves multiple people. There’s always a sense of community or collectivity,” Clarke notes, but she adds,
