For more than twenty years, Deanna Bowen’s practice has evolved from its roots in experimental documentary video into a complex mapping of power as seen in public and private archives. Research and exhibitions are rarely mutually exclusive modes for Bowen, in part because her subjects are capable of revealing new perspectives over time. Whether it is through strategies of re-enactment or dense constellations of archival material, Bowen’s work traces her familial history within a broader narrative of Black survival in Canada and the United States.
Black Drones in the Hive, an interdisciplinary exhibition that reveals the strategic erasures which enable canons to exist without question or complication. The exhibition draws its title from a disparaging assessment of Williams Robinson, a local Black journeyman, as written by the Deputy Reeve of Berlin (now Kitchener) in the records of the Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge (1869 - 1950)(1). Combing local archives, KWAG's Permanent Collection, historical publications, and wartime propaganda, Bowen weaves together narrative threads of labour, migration, dispossession, and militarization.
(1) William Jaffray, A Day at the Waterloo Poor House, and What I Learned There, 45, quoted in “William Jaffray,” Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge, November 28, 2016, http://waterloohouseofrefuge.ca/people/william-jaffray/.
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