Sandra Brewster It’s all a blur…
Winner of the 2017 Gattuso Prize!
It’s all a blur… is a series of gestural portraits made with photo-based gel transfers. Sandra Brewster uses the medium as a metaphor for movement or change from one place to another, specifically in reference to the migration of her parents and their peers who left Guyana for Toronto in the late 1960s. Inspired by the preciousness of old photographs and their relationship to time and memory, this series mimics and somewhat exaggerates the physical quality of those photographs by revealing imperfections left by creases, tears, and folds.
Brewster is interested in how change, especially change of location, impacts identity. She relates this work to Dionne Brand’s writing, which explores the complexities involved in forming a sense of self, focusing on that same generation of Caribbeans arriving to Canada. They “come full of ourselves—who we were and are and will become.”
Sandra Brewster is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose work employs a range of media to engage concepts of movement that express an internal relationship with identity, grounded in people of the Caribbean diaspora who maintain a relationship with “back home.” Born to Guyanese parents, Brewster is interested in a sense of being that is multi-layered, made up of a collision between geographies and temporalities. She expresses these complexities via the unfixed nature of her works’ materiality and presentation.