Artistic focus:

A project in mapping African diasporic movement and a genealogical investigation in equal measure, my autobiographical, process-driven interdisciplinary practice is concerned with the document and the act of witnessing. My practice revolves around the research and creation of conceptually rooted works that draw upon interrogations of personal and community based genealogical research, local and international 'domestic' histories, American slavery, Migration & Diaspora studies, Trauma theory and corollary discussions of memory and testimony, Southern Gothic Literature, and contemporary debates about political/personal art production. My works are informed by theories related to the aestheticization of the "unspeakable" as they contribute to my efforts to reconstitute the self/collective by artistically “working through” familial and community silences.

Bio:

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of the Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. She is a Toronto based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited internationally in numerous film festivals and galleries. She has received several grants in support of her artistic practice. Current works have been shown at the Images Festival of Film, Video & New Media, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, and the Art Gallery of York University. Her commissioned eighteen minute performed oral history sum of the parts: what can be named will be mounted in the exhibition Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection in August 2011 and her solo exhibition Stories to pass on... opens at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, Alberta in February 2012 and will continue to tour nationally in Canada throughyear end. She was recently awarded research/creation funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to develop and create Pain and Wastings (formerly visitations), an experimental video installation/dual portrait based on her mother's stories of growing up in one of the few black families residing in Vancouver, BC through the 1950s-'80s.

Bowen is currently working on The Paul Good Papers, an interdisciplinary residency/installation for the Images Festival and Gallery 44 (April 2012 launch) based on the archived recordings of veteran broadcast reporter Paul Good. Bowen will also premiere a major solo intervention/exhibition that unravels the Ku Klux Klan and its connections to Canada for Spring 2013 @ the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) in Toronto.

CV:

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