Deanna Bowen

This black-on-black book brings together over 20 years of Deanna Bowen's commitment to the excavation and recontextualization of colonial legacies-particularly those which implicate her family history and the Black diaspora in North America-making her artworks vital, both in Canada and abroad. Working primarily with photography-both rediscovered and new, but also video, documentary film, sound, performance, publishing, found objects and installation art - Bowen introduces us to a re-reading of white historic and archival facts.

From its early roots in experimental documentary to constellations of found imagery, Bowen's practice has articulated how the familial histories of Black folks-histories often relegated to the margins - illuminate the official record. When she re-contextualizes previously published images in her projects, or revives discarded negatives, Bowen is hyper-aware of W.E.B. Du Bois' concept of "double consciousness"-the notion that to be Black is to live with the conflict of seeing yourself represented by White authors while profoundly recognizing the limits of such representation. - Crystal Mowry

Co-published with Scotiabank Photography Award, Toronto

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Since the early 1990s Bowen's family history has been pivotal to her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works, in which she defines the Black body and traces its presence and movement in place and time. She has received numerous grants and awards including the William H. Johnson Prize (2014), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016) and the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020). Bowen lives and works in Montreal, where she is Assistant Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D-4D Image Making at Concordia University. She is the editor of Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (2019).

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