Here I Am Here
Video, accompanied by original music composed and performed on violin
Created for the Textile Museum of Canada

6:02

2023
 

Here I Am Here is propelled by the power of historic garments to reflect intimate lived experiences while simultaneously revealing broader cultural truth and meaning. This video work is guided by four objects from the Textile Museum of Canada collection, two white dresses and two corresponding slips sewn by Fleta Pollard for a child in the 1920s. With these garments, Here I Am Here explores the multilayered symbolism communicated by a white dress, including inner strength, vulnerability, rites of passage, political activism, and social constraints and prejudices. 

 

In filming white dresses hanging from trees in different landscapes, Here I Am Here references Canadian painter Mary Pratt’s powerful, unsettling 1986 painting Wedding Dress, depicting a wedding dress hanging from a tree. Here I Am Here extends the charged atmosphere of Pratt’s painting to simultaneously evoke presence and absence, foreground misogyny and erasure, and assert the strength and agency of women and girls.