#PASSION: EMILY MEI-MEI ROSE IN CONVERSATION WITH BRAXTON GARNEAU

#PASSION: EMILY MEI-MEI ROSE IN CONVERSATION WITH BRAXTON GARNEAU

Interview by Emily Mei-Mei Rose
All images courtesy of the artist

Combining visual influences from classical European portraiture and Afro-Caribbean culture with harvested and hand-processed materials, he creates portraits, shrines, and corporeal forms that explore the sociocultural history of his Caribbean heritage.

Garneau’s recent body of work, Procession, specifically looks at the traditions of costuming and European influences on the development of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, and its precursor “Canboulay”— a festival of both resistance and celebration, developed by former indentured laborers and slaves in response to the 18th century masquerades of the French-colonial elite.

Across his body of work, Garneau deeply engages complex networks of exchange between people, industry, material, migration, coloniality, or culture.

Emily Mei-Mei Rose: Your recent body of work for Procession draws our attention to the complex colonial history and deeply embedded cultural roots of Canboulay, a precursor to the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. What initially drew you to Canboulay as a vehicle to delve into specific aspects of Caribbean history?

Braxton Garneau: It stems from a childhood fascination with Carnival. My paternal grandparents spoke to me about it from the time I was four or five years old, promising that one day I’d get to experience it with them. They described it as being this celebration of mythical proportions with grand costumes, music and dancing. As I got older, and the possibility of making that trip became more feasible, I wanted to really understand the roots of this celebration.

My grandparents moved back to Trinidad after 40 years in Canada, and at the age of 26, I went to experience Carnival with them. It’s still the most significant cultural celebration in Trinidad and has endured for nearly 200 years.

How does your childhood imagination of this celebration compare to your first-hand experience of it as an adult? Does that imagination continue to shape your work?

Given that my grandparents’ accounts were based on their experiences before the 60s and largely nostalgic, the idea that I had of Carnival was outdated by the time I experienced it. The history of Canboulay and the original costumes were an integral part of the celebrations when my grandparents were first experiencing it, but now those portions of the festivities have become a lot smaller and are not as popular.
Carnival is forever changing to represent contemporary concerns and ideas, but the whimsical and imaginative qualities that I envisioned as a child still continue to shape my work.

There is a fantastical way that your work represents these Carnivalesque characters. It’s very much to do with these masks that were inherited from French colonial masquerades, and you employ visual influences from both classical European portraiture and Afro-Caribbean culture. Can you speak a bit on how you navigate the complex intersections of these influences through your work?

I pull a lot of formal inspiration from European portraiture, specifically 17th century Dutch portraiture of the nobility.

I’m interested in your use of characters and portraiture throughout your work—whether they be re-imaginations of 17th-century figures of nobility, archetypal Carnival characters, or intimate depictions of your own family. As much of your work explores the sociocultural histories of your own Caribbean heritage, I wonder if and how you see yourself in conversation with these characters and figures from your personal life, as well as how you might see them in conversation with each other?

Often, when thinking about portraiture, in my practice, each subject stems from a fascination with the cultural context of a material, a personal experience or event, or in the case of the Carnival characters, a specific psychological function. It shifts from work to work. Sometimes, the themes will complement one another, and sometimes they contrast. My practice is really about me translating my thoughts into something tangible.

In the Procession series, the figures are presented out of context, posed and costumed. The portraits of your family differ in that the figures are tied to the domestic sphere, to this sphere of ultimate intimacy, presented in candid moments in various states of undress. I see these works relating to Procession in the sense that both offer snapshots of a moment—these are moments of a particular form of intimacy that differ, yet still seem somehow in conversation with each other.

I think subconsciously I’m always pulling from the Dutch tradition of portraiture, which will range from these very extravagant depictions of nobility to very unflattering domestic scenarios and even caricature. You will see paintings of the artist’s mother, which are by no means flattering, but somehow very authentic and intimate. Those are some of the paintings I spend the most time with.
There is a portrait I painted of my brother based on a photograph taken from the moment he woke up. There is a certain intimacy captured there, yet the pose has the feeling of a strong classical aesthetic structure.
I love a balance of refined and natural elements—which also comes through in my use of material. I typically rely on realistic representations of a figure, but I incorporate material elements that are less refined or less processed, such as soil, raffia, bones and roots.

I hadn’t thought about how the formality of the portrait itself can be undermined or layered through materiality. You’ve mentioned the concept of “material honesty” in your artistic practice. Could you elaborate on what this means to you? How do you see materials like raffia, sugarcane pulp, cowrie shells, and asphalt, with their inextricable colonial histories and cultural ties, contributing to the narrative qualities of your work?

For me, material honesty means embracing the inherent qualities of the material that I’m using—letting the natural luster, texture, or value of that material shine in a piece. Many of my figurative works are without an identifiable background, and I use these materials as identifiers to contextualize them in a place or time within a certain cultural framework.
Materials like raffia and sugarcane tie my work to Trinidad and the greater African diaspora. The sugar industry, for example, was the reason that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to Trinidad. Trinidad was one of the most efficient exporters of sugar in the British West Indies. That industry shaped the landscape—the physical landscape of Trinidad and the sociocultural landscape. Including sugarcane in my paintings is a substitute for painting a sugarcane field in the background. It’s also one of those symbols that relies on the viewer’s own knowledge of the material. Not everyone will understand the correlations, but the material is a symbol known to those who have spent generations in proximity to it.

I think that the way you use materiality very effectively ties what I see as this visual snapshot in your portraits, to a spatial imaginary–to place. But it’s place that’s been moved. It’s place that’s been transported. And it ties into time in a particular way.

Exactly, I’m transposing that context into the figure.

Where do you source your materials from?

I have a large collection of found and scavenged materials that I started collecting in childhood and have continued to maintain. I’ve collected materials during my visits to Trinidad, on my walks in the prairies of Canada, including bones and cow vertebrae. This process of using all of the available resources is something I’ve inherited from all sides of my family. For example, the figure in Cannes Brûlées incorporates cow vertebrae left over from oxtail stew, a traditional dish in the Caribbean.

I imagine you must have a cabinet of curiosities in your studio.

I do! And I have bins upon bins that are all labeled. There’s a method to the chaos.

One of the things that I appreciate about your use of materials, particularly materials like asphalt and bones, is that it embodies this language of sedimentation—different material elements that become a part of the land through processes of decomposing, recomposing, restructuring. It’s, again, very related to place, in the sense that you can say exactly where this dirt came from, or where those bones came from. I’m curious how that connection to place translates as the work itself travels from place to place. Having had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles (2023), Calgary (2021) and Edmonton (2019), as well as an upcoming solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2024), can you discuss the evolution of your work across these different exhibition spaces and how each experience has contributed to the ongoing development of your practice?

I’m very conscious about the physical space when conceiving a show. Each one of these opportunities has provided very unique spaces that I am able to respond to. Ideally, my exhibitions will always contain both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, and I am able to create an environment as part of that experience.
For all of these exhibitions, the work was made specifically for the space as well as the location. For example, the show in Los Angeles considered the site of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the connections between La Brea Pitch Lake in Trinidad and the oil sands in Northern Alberta. For my latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta, I am again considering the site, but have removed the figure entirely. The exhibition still tells a story about people and place, but focuses on landscape as the main subject. This project has pushed my work into the realm of installation, focusing on expanding materials, and made me reconsider the relationship between the figure and the landscape.

If you’re removing the figure and building out the exhibition as the landscape, do the visitors then become the figures in this show?

In a way, they do. I’m placing the visitors between two bitumen-rich landmasses—one is centered around Alberta, where I was born and raised, and the other is centered around Trinidad and Pitch Lake. I see the visitor’s experience between these two physical masses as representative of my own experience as someone whose identity has been deeply informed by these two places. It’s also about the migration of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, specifically in the 60s as laborers in the extractive industries in Alberta.

The use of asphalt in your solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta not only connects to personal narratives, but also grounds your work in the inextricable colonial histories, patterns of migration, and cultural ties of generations of Caribbeans. Can you share more about the personal significance of asphalt in your artistic process? How do you see your work contributing to a broader network of stories and experiences across generations, particularly within the Afro-Caribbean diaspora?

During my first visit to Trinidad, I went to La Brea Pitch Lake, which is the largest natural asphalt deposit in the world. I was fascinated at seeing it in its various states and was excited by the mutability of the material. I love the idea of change and transformation. Asphalt embodies this as without an aggregate, it will always return to a puddle.
I was initially drawn to its formal qualities and it fed into my visual language, which relies on natural materials to contextualize my work.
Geographically, asphalt links my work to both Trinidad and Alberta. Alberta’s industry of extraction brought my paternal grandfather to Canada, along with many other Caribbeans. And that same industry employed my maternal grandfather. So, asphalt is this product of extraction that has sustained both sides of my family.

In terms of the stability of asphalt at various stages, do the works you make out of asphalt change over time? Are they mutable as well?

They are subject to change, as all natural materials are, but it is imperceptibly slow. I use a more stabilized water-based asphalt emulsion in my work. This applies to most of the materials I use—raffia, bones, soil, even raw canvas—

What can audiences expect in your upcoming exhibition, Pay Dirt? How does this upcoming exhibition build on or diverge from your previous bodies of work?

This exhibition is the largest scale installation I’ve built to date. It is an immersive, spatial experience for the viewer, placing them between two landscapes. It builds on my previous work in the sense that I am anchoring this project to the materiality of asphalt, but in this particular work, there are no obvious figures. The exhibition is part of an ongoing cultural and historical discussion in my work about the relationship between materials, industry, people and migration.