Anna Jane McIntyre Canada

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I am an artist with a practice combining studio arts and microactivism. My work investigates how people maintain their notions-of-self through visual cues. My projects are an expression of Afropresentism, combining my cultural influences. My work acknowledges the past-present-future, in joyous response to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 's: prompt Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community

Photo: Aa is for Aforpresentism, Photo by Kinga Michalska

I am an interdisciplinary artist with a practice combining drawing, installation, printmaking, costume, storytelling and micro-activism. My projects explore and celebrate the ways in which people decipher experience, manufacture belonging, create and maintain culture and senses of self.

Recent projects include working with the Black Community Resource Centre (BCRC) on the animation of the book project of Where They Stood: The Evolution of the Black Anglo Community in Montreal, commissioned projects for the Canada-wide exhibition of While Black, curated by Charles Campbell, Michelle Jacques and Denise Ryner, a banner-composition, Bouteille à la mer/Postcards from the Edge, honouring Black history in the Eastern Townships installed at the United Church of Philipsburg, an Underground Railroad station stop for fugitive enslaved Black people escaping the United States, a tea service created in support of dr. rosalind hampton’s academic research Plotting Black Studies in Canada: Montreal and Toronto, images for the newly named Toronto Metropolitan University Dr. Mélanie Knight Advisor to the Dean, Blackness and Black Diasporic Education, commissioned bookwork design and illustrations highlighting 12 labour activists for the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, commissioned fabric pattern design for costuming a character for Anishaabe-French artist Emilie Monnet’s play Marguerite Le feu, designing a large wall mural for the QTBIPOC community and student coalition at Queen’s University amongst others.

My art practice ranges from illustrations to 3200 square foot multimedia immersive forest installations, giant emojis, feminist-foosball-tables, intergenerational community workshops parade floats, commercial signage, choose your own adventure tales, Afropresent truths & fictions, colouring books for those with complex, shifting and fluid identities, urban ecology forest school cahiers for BIPOC kids, Speaker's corners, love-letter-services and homages-for-the-forgotten.

My artistic aesthetic combines my cultural influences (Trinidadian, British, Canadian) through the juxtaposition of familiar materials in novel usages and forms. The playful mash-up of materials acknowledges the active nature of negotiating culture and belonging, as well as the contradictions that may exist within our self-definitions. Projects explore the spoken, the historical, the contemporary, the imagined, the unexpected, clichés, the mundane and extraordinary realities of modern day living. I seek to create work acknowledging the past and present, as well as imagine a beautiful dream of what is to come.