Letticia Cosbert Miller

There are no parts (May 9 - June 26, 2022)

This exhibition brings together artists Nydia Blas, Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Michèle Pearson Clarke, who each explore the complexity of Black girlhood through photography.

Here, girlhood is understood not merely as a temporal encounter, but as a framework through which we, regardless of age and gender, are able to engage with the meanings and lives of Black girls. Girlhood is a liberatory and creative space in which one is continually being and becoming, acquiring knowledge of self, and seeking practical ways of coping with and resisting cultural constraints and expectations. From the mundane to the magnificent, Black girls are responding to representations of and attitudes towards class, gender, race, ability, and sexuality. This exhibition displays those responses–the devices, gestures, and embellishments by which Black girls manifest their ideas and create their own, new images of self.

There are no parts honours the interdependence of the lives of girls and women, while recognizing them as distinct experiences. Historically, the designation of girlhood specifically and childhood in general was a privilege limited to particular social classes, and as such there are many Black girls who have become footnotes or are otherwise absent from images, records, and movements which they created, participated in, or resisted. The images presented here flaunt Black girls and girlhood as playful, powerful, forlorn, and fly, each created by a Black woman summoning her own childhood or someone near to her. The artists as well as their images are diasporically-oriented, gazing beyond a North American context towards the southern Black Atlantic, specifically Senegal, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. The social and cultural conditions of an intercepted girlhood permeate the work of Widline Cadet, whose images conjure memories through doubling and rearward glimpses, as well as the work of Michèle Pearson Clarke whose self-portraits often make manifest what was unattainable for a queer masculine child growing up in Trinidad. Nydia Blas captures on polaroid, over the span of many years, moments of confrontation and intimacy between girls who she is community with–as their mother, sister, and friend, and the work of Jasmine Clarke regularly features her contemplative younger sister in surreal settings and solemn expressions.

The title There are no parts references a poem by Jamaican American poet June Jordan, who wrote extensively about her girlhood and its defining characteristics, and the exhibition itself is influenced greatly by the work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Trinidadian scholar and activist, whose analysis of girlhood requests an “intentional remembering,” that is, building a living memory that has little to do with living in the past and more with creating a relationship to time and its purpose. This exhibition demonstrates that girlhood is neither linear nor chronological, each image commemorating all that could neither be achieved nor contained in the defined domain of girlhood, and conveys that there is no part that can be separated from the whole.

Installation photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy The Blackwood

The Blackwood Educator-in-Residence Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan leads a tour of There are no parts, part of "Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter," a 6-part lightbox series across the University of Toronto Mississauga campus for 2021–22.

Cinematography, editing, and production: Vuk Dragojevic

Attunement Session | Facilitated by Educator-in-Residence Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan, six interdisciplinary practitioners have been invited to develop an Attunement Session that responds to an image set with prompts that challenge viewers to open new ways of understanding what we see. Each of these sessions offer pedagogic tools to assist audiences with “tuning-in” by means of embodiment, perception, texture, joy, meditation, encounter, touch, intimacy, sound, intuition, or other senses.

For the fifth session, dancer and artist Justine A. Chambers has created six prompts reminiscent of childhood notes passed in class. What embodied memories do we carry from youth? What knowings do we possess deep in our bones? How can we intentionally remember? Sensations from our past continue to feel into the present and future. Through a series of kinaesthetic echoes, Chambers contemplates the temporal transcendence of girlhood and its persistence through skin and flesh

Respondent Program (forthcoming) | Across the six-part lightbox series Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, each curator activates a Respondent Program that brings a practitioner into dialogue with an image set. The Blackwood is pleased to welcome writer Yaniya Lee to create a response to There are no parts.