Take a Moment...
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© Anna Jane McIntyre
Game Face (Now You Know)
Artist: Anna Jane McIntyre
Date: 2018
Size: 60"w x 122"h 5 ft x 10 ft 2 inches
Photograph by Jean-Michael Seminaro, Montreal
Medium: Linden woodcut prints, Akua printing inks, Arnhem 1618 cotton rag printmaking paper, Winsor & Newton watercolours, copper nails, stories, lies, facts, assorted truths, omissions, hearsay, heresy, graphite, mixed emotions, pencil crayon, blood, sweat, tears, spit, elbow grease, rhinestones, glue, gold leaf, silver leaf, bronze leaf, glitter, Darjeeling tea, Trinidadian cocoa, Trinidadian cinnamon, Québécois sage smoke
Text by the artist: Anna Jane McIntyre
Game Face (Now You Know) was commissioned for the traveling group exhibition The Visual Life of Social Affliction curated by David Scott, Erica Moiah James, Nijah Cunningham and Juliet Ali of Small Axe Project. The Visual Life of Social Affliction was an invitation for 11 visual artists and writers with links to the Caribbean to create work reflecting and recognising the history, legacy and contemporary repercussions of colonial violence in the Caribbean.
The title, Game Face (Now You Know), is symbolic of a breath. Game Face - Breath in. (Now You Know) - Breath out. This giant emoji portrait is based on my 2017 passport photo. The portrait is admittedly me and not-me. The work is an orchestrated puzzle of woodblock prints that were assembled and disassembled for each exhibition. The relief prints were loosely nailed to the gallery walls with copper nails for each showing—in Miami (during Art Basel), The Bahamas (during Hurricane Dorian) and Rotterdam (during Covid).
I first started planning Game Face (Now You Know) in January 2018 carving a linden woodblock whilst facing the forest and listening to the background sounds of my family, the murmurings of ancestral ghosts, the wind in the thinking trees, life, the ocean, motmots, hummingbirds, chickens and cuckoos in Trinidad & Tobago. Eduardo Kohn’s incredible book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human was my talisman and never far. How to work with all these inherited and adopted histories and mixed emotions?
Once back in Montreal I immersed myself in the legacy of blackness, working slowly in the hours before sunrise carving the woodblock bit by bit to create a private visual language layering the half-told histories to make them more manageable. My black body led the way while I worked to steady my breath to contain the intense emotion these histories induce.
For further reading on Game Face (Now You Know) please consult the VLOSA catalogue essay---> Textures in the Work of Anna Jane McIntyre by Christina León.
Image copyright holder: Anna Jane McIntyre
Take a Moment for Representation: An Anti-Racism Series
We are proud to present Concordia University Library's inaugural digital exhibition. Take a Moment presents a series of un-interrupted moments for solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, for reflection on systemic racism, and for making space for Black representation. At this exact moment in time, let us pause for a minute, or two, or more...
Take a Moment Coordinators: Rachel Harris and Sarah Lake
Questions? Please contact: lib-exhibitions@concordia.ca
