The Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is pleased to welcome Karice Mitchell to the department as a Lecturer with a focus on photography.
She will be teaching the following courses in the upcoming 2021-2022 semester:
VISA 240 001 — Photography
VISA 241 001, 002 — Digital Photography
VISA 340 002 — Intermediate Photography I
VISA 341 001 — Intermediate Photography II
VISA 401C 001 — Advanced Open Studio
Karice Mitchell is a photo-based installation artist whose practice uses found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to the representation of the Black female body in pornography and popular culture. Her work seeks to re-contextualize pre-existing images to reimagine possibilities for Black womanhood and sexuality detached from the white gaze and patriarchy. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and has recently completed her MFA at the University of Waterloo.
“Photography has been, and is, central to that aspect of decolonization that calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds. Using images, we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye.”
– bell hooks, from In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life
“As someone that has used photography and the creation of images as a tool of empowerment, I am excited at the prospect of teaching within the medium to extend that possibility to the students of UBC. My artistic practice approaches image-making through an interdisciplinary lens therefore, I am particularly excited to integrate a range of art-mediums with the traditions of photography in my pedagogy to expand the possibilities of image-making.”
Mitchell’s research engages with how historical narratives, racism and colonization have wrongfully denied Black women of agency and subjectivity. Her work sees pornography as a field full of potential to begin fostering new meaningful relationships between Black women and sexuality. The process of her work sits between analog and digital process, often processing found images from magazines through flatbed scanners and digital platforms to serve as a starting point for the creation of her images. Through the recontextualization of images from Black erotica through a range of material explorations her work seeks to reclaim the Black female body to reframe it as a polyvalent, complex subject to begin thinking more radically of Black female sexuality.
Her most recent project take care in collaboration with Hamilton Artists Inc is a billboard size photo installation currently on view outside the gallery. Through the use of scale the image seeks to unapologetically represent blackness as a site of resistance. The text accompanying the image serves as a subversion of how historically the Black female body has been wrongfully and carelessly treated. The words “take care” gesture to the importance of carving space for Black women to take care of themselves while acknowledging a collective history.
Through Young Canada Works she had the opportunity to work at Gallery 44: Centre for Contemporary Photography assisting in providing youth and adult photo-based educational programming. She has exhibited in a number of group shows around Toronto and exhibited her seminal thesis show 1b, black legs, 52” at the University of Waterloo Gallery alongside publishing her thesis support paper in April 2021.
