Vanessa Godden’s arrival in Toronto in 2020 felt like the end of a long chase. After a childhood in Houston, Texas, and extended stays in pursuit of higher education in Rhode Island and Melbourne, Australia, they found a context and community that better suited exploration of artistic pursuits linked to their sense of Caribbean identity. Their forthcoming solo exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Transgressive Passages, presents the results of their experiments with dye, fabric, sound and film during the RBC Emerging Artist residency at the gallery over this past summer. Transmission and Transference provided them with opportunities to expand and deepen their sense of diasporic community belonging as they tested new directions in photography and performance. Their exhibition opens October 12, 2024. -Andil Gosine

Transgressive Passages is a multi-work project that investigates and activates the intersections between my Caribbean lineage and Queer and Trans becoming. The project features fifteen photographs of Queer Caribbean people and a live performance that reflects on my experience navigating multiple LGBTQIA2S+ communities across North America and Australia, how these relationships entangle with my diasporic Caribbean identity.

I grew up in Houston, Texas surrounded by people from various regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America. There were, however, very few people from the Caribbean accessible to me outside of my family, and in my family, Queerness was not acknowledged or welcomed. The academic degrees I then pursued in New England and Australia provided no respite from this sense of alienation. But when I moved to Toronto in 2020, I was finally immersed in a community and field of practice that more comfortably fit. To deepen connections to and express appreciation for this Queer Caribbean community, I developed Transgressive Passages through a residency with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. This project allowed me to not only construct work that pays homage to those that I already know, but also introduce me to people outside of my existing networks.

I have been connecting with, photographing, and collecting audio recordings from people of the Queer Caribbean diaspora who live in proximity to me and/or the gallery. The subjects of these images are featured alongside textiles I have been hand-dying using various food and plant-based materials. The dyed textiles are intended to be abstract representations of each of the sitter's connections to Caribbean folklore characters of their choosing and/or specific Caribbean culture/tradition. The textiles adorn the Queer Caribbean diasporic participants as a way to represent them as powerful agents of resilience and hope through metaphorical threads of connection. The photographic series produced for Transgressive Passages, titled Transmission, features portraits of ten Queer people from the Caribbean, of the Caribbean diaspora, and/or with Caribbean ancestry living in Toronto or Durham region. Notably, working with this group of people has given me access to a sense of familiarity that expands my existing experiences of Queer kinship. For instance, while having ice cream on Church Street with Trinidadian-Canadian elder LeZlie Lee Kam after our photoshoot, my heart swelled in ways that are beyond description as we were sharing openly and joyfully about our experiences of Queerness, something that I had long missed in my own family.  

The images are made through analogue and digital practices and present each subject situated amongst green spaces near their homes. The process of working between analogue and digital was a way to experiment with different capturing techniques. I primarily worked between my Mamiya RB67 medium format camera and Canon Mark III DSLR. The Mamiya served as a lesson in slowing down completely. Its bulk and the limited frames available to each roll made working with the camera a precious experience. There was an intimacy that I was able to achieve with each sitter using the film camera that felt different from my DSLR. With the Mamiya, because the viewfinder is at the top of the camera, I had to wear a hood or shroud to block out the sun in order to appropriately focus each image. While under the shroud, I was muttering reminders to myself to meter, advance the film, find the focus, and negotiate with the camera for its cooperation. From this absurd scene, I was able to provide moments of humor and levity for the subjects to feel more at ease around the impressive looking camera. The act of taking time, really slowing down the process of capturing an image, meant spending more time getting to know each sitter better and allowing them the time to get to know me. 

I have been using my time at the residency to develop a new hour-long performance for the 7a*11D International Performance Festival. This work, titled Transference, encompasses my body traversing between containers of water that gradually shrink as I move between them. I begin inside a rain-water collection barrel, swirling my body through the saltwater that fills the container, creating sounds that interact with a sound composition, produced in collaboration with Visual and Sonic artist James Knott. With each movement between containers, my body begins to overtake the surface area of a steel drum and a mixing bowl, displacing the saltwater within. The sound composition begins with my own field recordings of sounds from Trinidad and Tobago mixed with collaboratively constructed experimental steel pan recordings. These sounds blend into audio recordings collected during the residency from the photography series’ participants, and conclude with the intermixing of a choir of sounds collected from Queer and Trans loved ones between Toronto, Texas (US), and Melbourne (Australia). The performance serves as a bridge between my Non-Binary Queer diasporic existence in the West and the lineages of movement instigated by colonization of South Asia and the Caribbean.

Both artworks, Transmission and Transference, in this series are intended to be extensions of one another–entangled through material and metaphor. They investigate and experiment with the complexities and agency in hyphenated identities. Rather than ascribing to precedent canons of Queerness presented through positions of difficulty and isolation in art, this project prioritizes the joy and connection of my ever expanding Queer community.