Mmm Hm, Uh Huh, Eh Heh
36” x 48”
Oils and nzu on canvas

Three figures sit in a cramped huddle on top of a wooden table. They are composed of deep greys and blacks, with flickering moments of brown, orange, and blue dancing across the canvas. Their gaze shifts between knowing side eyes, as they seem to emerge or reflect the cracks of the wooden table.

Mmm Hm, Uh Huh, Eh Heh speaks to the limits of representation and inclusion without repair or revolution. Rather than an outright rejection of a seat at the table, the contemporary landscape of the BC Arts sector can assert and even desire Black creativity but through the modality of tokenization, spectacle, and becoming embedded and objectified into the framework of said table.  Shallow representation becomes a fulcrum to empower assimilation into a culture of grey and beige passivity and ambivalence.

Mmm Hm, Uh Huh, Eh Heh asks how do we resist becoming tokens and agents of pacification. When they pillage, ask for feigned cultural exchange, and ask to look away from the horrors, how do we stay rooted in the earth and connected to our embodied ways of knowing and alchemizing.  

When the imperial core continues to transform and drape itself in the aesthetics and language of liberation without repair, Mmm Hmm, Uh Huh, Eh Heh asks us to return to urgent survival strategies, rest and resistance, and embodied curiosity and transformation.