Buseje Bailey
The Stage of Desire, 1997

Observatoire 4, Montreal, January 22 - February 15, 1997

Alice Ming Wai Jim

This review first appeared in Parachute 87, July-September 1997, 48-50.

To walk into "Retaining…Desire" by Vita Plume and Buseje Bailey is to interrupt an intimate yet inviting conversation about the act and art of remembering. Dealing with the different vessels that exist to retain memory, and, by extension, personal and cultural histories, this exhibition was the product of a year-long communication between Plume in Montreal and Bailey in Toronto. For the artists, ordinary everyday objects such as bricks, bags and garments play important roles in the preservation of memories.

In "Retaining…" or Huff…Puff…and BLOW!!! (1997), Plume, an artist of Latvian descent who has been exhibiting her work across Canada, the U.S. and Europe since the 1980s, uses an old bed to address the notion of memory. This choice of setting, complete with matching white chairs on each side of the bed, immediately situates the viewer within a domestic space, a place of refuge and of contemplation. However, the site is problematized by the focal point of the installation-an unfinished wall constructed out of steel mesh bricks that substitutes for the bed's mattress. Representing the artist's neatly packaged memories, the tinselly bricks, laid with care on top of each other, are filled with an eclectic collection of objects. These "artifacts of her daily existences" range from dried tea bags and flowers, popcorn, soup spoons and balls of coloured yarn to stuffed animals, books, photographs, personal letters and rocks of all shapes and sizes.

Cast in a dramatic light by a strong spotlight on its right, this wall is a reference to both the relationship between memory and materiality, and the political, military and ideological barrier of the Iron Curtain. In the collaborative text written by the artists to accompany the exhibition, Plume writes: "My family has lived divided, separated by/…the Iron Curtain/…by more than a wall." By deliberately placing this wall in the domestic sphere, the installation blurs the borders between home and world, public and private, the ego and the subconscious. Moreover, it reveals the ease with which memory disrupts the perceived order of things through a process of selective remembering. As a result, Huff…Puff…and BLOW!!! demonstrates the actual instability of the walls that people construct around themselves, their memories and their nations.

For "…Desire" or The Stage of Desire (1997), Bailey continues this fabrication of memory in its use of sculptural elements and a series of dresses to critique the absence of Black women's historical subjectivity. Jamaican-born Bailey has been exhibiting her work in artist-run centres across Canada since the late 1980s. In this latest installation which represents a move away from her recent video-based work, Bailey has assembled a cast of objects that bring to life her experiences of childhood and womanhood that make up the individual she is today.

The three dresses, all unique in their own treatments, give an immediate sense of corporeality to the absent actors of this narrative. Found at the back of the gallery is a faded pale green dress worn by a nine-year-old Bailey to her aunt's wedding encased in a battered wooden frame beneath a pane of glass onto which the words "the viewing room" are stenciled. According to Bailey, this dress, decorated with scarves and chain-like ribbons, "is the site where we find the innocent dreams of a girl child…where the child is still full of hope and dreams." Reinforcing the theme of childhood innocence and discovery nearby is the sad clown smothered with newspaper clippings about growing pains. The clown whose face is half-black and half-white is shielded by a giant leaf made from bamboo and organic twine, and alludes to the fear of cultural assimilation upon Self-discovery.

Echoing the light green colour of the child's dress is the free-flowing traditional African robe constructed out of shredded confidential documents left behind by the corporate world. Except for the front which is painstakingly woven out of different coloured paper and the trimmings of paper doilies at the sleeves and collar, the many strands of shredded paper hang like a cascade of straw and natural fibres over almost the entire robe. Partially hidden by a yellow braid under the dress front are the words "retreating into my problematic roots." This handmade garment and the neighbouring old blue and white floral print dress enshrouded by a plastic tent covered in text on ideas of the Self, both refer to how Black children, never taught in school about the histories of the diaspora often undergo an intense search for Self identity later in life in order to reclaim their cultural heritage.

Making the closing speech for the finale of The Stage of Desire are the two masks of Bailey's face. One, covered in thick black paint, represents the falsity of the term "Black" while the other, left unpainted to allow the different colours of the paper to come through its waxy surface, represents the actual multicultural nature of the diaspora. Held in a bag woven out of the same shredded paper as the traditional African robe, they speak of Bailey's present experience of self-discovery and understanding of difference. All these objects-the dresses, the masks and the clown-are linked together through their predilection to a containment of some sort that safeguards the memories which they embody. Bailey's Stage of Desire not only comments on how women have resisted the way society controls and negates their lives very early on through fashion and the education system but also suggests how memories are often reconstructed through the preservation of material possessions. In Bailey's work, as in Plume's, the impossibility of material objects to fully engender memory is revealed in their fragility, permeability and transiency. A testimony to the memories which not only shield us from everyday invasions of the Self but also ensure that tomorrow is not lost without a past, "Retaining… Desire" is a reminder that life itself depends on the act of remembering and the strength and resilience of the vessels chosen to embody the mnemonic process.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at McGill University. She is currently researching media art in Hong Kong.