Hard Black love potions from a golden glass
Deion Squires

Opening Reception: Friday, June 5th, 7-9pm

Hard Black love potions from a golden glass is an ongoing time-based photographic project by Toronto-born and UK-based photographer Deion Squires, co-curated by Christina Oyawale & Kelsey Myler. The project features a selection of expanded photographic sculpture and image work. Deion seeks to investigate and research the presence of Blackness in visual culture from an absurdist and Afrosurrealist framework. He does this through photographing the feverish, complex and mundane of Black life. Deion comes to terms with “the dreamlike possibility of black intimacy as an unlikely path to futurity”, inspired by the words of D. Scot Miller, while acknowledging the nuance of Blackness in a monolithic society. 

The revelatory light of the photograph is staggering 一 a searing glow that passes through and passes over. The camera is a ray gun; load, aim, fire! The laser pierces through to where we cannot see, so that we may make sense of it. The image then is a portal by which we can bring things into the realm of the real. Attempting to reveal layers of the world so that they might be read, understood and absorbed. Making connections between the interiors of lived experience and the exteriors of shared space. The work processes the reconstruction of two-dimensional realities to reflect lived three-dimensional experiences as Black individuals. There is a quintessence of surrealism to living as a Black person that speaks to the unreal and sense of normality to those outside that lived experience. Hard black love seeks to investigate the uncanniness of Afrosurrealism, while discussing lived “realities” outside the notion of Black art only occupying the diasporic art landscape. The exhibition posits the questions: Who authenticates the truth? Whose responsibility or right is it to decide which realities to reveal? Where does this alternate reality, this sur-reality, lie? 

Deion traverses the ephemerality of Blackness through vernacular images of family life, modern Black joy and the radical act of simply occupying space. This is done by exploring the visual history of violence against black people that is ingrained in aesthetic culture. Rather than completely invert the standard, we can move laterally; from non-fictional cruelty into fictional horror, we can settle into surrealism. 

Deion Squires

Born in Canada, the son of Caribbean immigrants, Deion Squires is an artist living and working out of London. Primarily image-based, his practice is largely influenced by queer identity, investigating the internet as a transformative tool, and performance as embodiment. 

Deion believes in long pauses; alongside themes of Black cognition and imagination, his work is concerned with stillness and anticipation. Being an “other” is the unspoken embodied fundament of his practice. Operating in a world unconsidered by most but lived in by many, colours his perspective on identity. 

Deion is striving to fill the gaps in his own aesthetic experience and enrich the experience of others along the way. Deion’s work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. He holds a BFA in Photography from Toronto Metropolitan University. Deion has done freelance work for brands and companies such as, DAZED Magazine, SUKO Magazine, i-D Magazine, Complex, Soho House, Spencer Badu, and Dr. Martens

Christina Oyawale

Christina Oyawale is a working-class queer disabled interdisciplinary-image artist, curator, and writer from Toronto, currently based in Winnipeg. Their practice maintains an autotheorical approach with ties to leftist-political economy, social identity theory, and decolonial cultural studies. This is reflected in their work as an amalgamation of images, archives, cultural critique, and longing for a post-digital connective space; utilizing their formal photography practice, printmaking, installation, and textiles. They are currently researching the parallels between queer/punk anti-aesthetics to family abolition, specifically, how subcultural narratives/politics have been excluded from traditional contemporary conversations.

Christina has a BFA in Photography from Toronto Metropolitan University, and is finishing their MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Manitoba. 

Kelsey Myler

Kelsey Myler (she/her) is a visual artist, archivist and arts worker from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Currently residing and working in Toronto, she holds a BFA in Image Arts: Photography Studies and is pursuing her MA in Film and Photography Preservation and Collection Management at Toronto Metropolitan University. Through her artistic and curatorial practice, she traces the complex relationships between memory, place, and cultural identity, with a keen interest in the archive as a site of joy, grief, and resistance within the context of broader sociopolitical issues.