June Clark. Dirge, 2003. Oxidized metal on canvas, 94 × 160 × 1.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds by exchange, and funds from Joyce and Fred Zemans, 2021. © June Clark, courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery. Photo: LF Documentation. 2020/137
Located on Level 2 in Gallery 249.
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In this display by American-born, Toronto-based artist June Clark, the American flag is both symbol and material. Growing up in Harlem and attending school there for eight years, Clark remembers being told that she was lucky to live in “the greatest, strongest, most compassionate and free country in the world.” In this installation of nine artworks, first exhibited in 2020, Clark harnesses the abstract and illusory associations of the American flag – freedom and equality among them – and through repetition and material inventiveness, re-imagines it until it feels unfamiliar. Materials, Clark writes, “are the grammar of my visual language,” a grammar that here reveals itself in work made from rust, tea stains or found objects.
"Unrequited Love" is dedicated to Colin Rand Kaepernick, the football quarterback who knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to call attention to the continued violence towards and oppression of Black people in America and around the world. This exhibition is curated by Julie Crooks, AGO Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in tandem with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
June Clark (b. 1941, Harlem, New York; Lives and works in Toronto) is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, sculpture and collage. Best known for her photo etchings and sculptural assemblages, Clark's autobiographical practice investigates themes of black diasporic identity, exile and memory work through reflections on her Harlem childhood and subsequent migration to Canada as a young adult. She began developing her early photography work through the Baldwin Street Gallery of Photography, co-founding The Women's Photography Co-op there in the early 1970s. Since then, her work has been exhibited in Toronto, Oakville, Burlington, Guelph, Montréal, New York City, Paris, Kiev and Quito, Ecuador. Recent solo exhibitions include: June Clark: Photographs, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2023); June Clark: Harlem Quilt, The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL (2022); Unrequited Love, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2020); JUNE CLARK, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018).
