Dark and Stormy (2015)Dark & Stormy is a site-specific video performance on Snake Island, Toronto Islands.Toronto has a long standing history of Caribbean migration that arguably played a great role in creating the multicultural city of today. Framed to raise the question of location, the video deliberately plays into preconceptions of the notion of “beach”. Where is it located? Is the woman a tourist or a local? Paradoxically appearing as a white tourist on a Caribbean beach, the artist is instead an immigrant to Toronto of half Caribbean heritage, raising the question of what a Caribbean person should look like. Ultimately the laborious act carried out in the performance becomes a tribute to the, at times, unrecognized cultural contributions that Caribbean migrants have made to the city and a reflexion on how race and belonging are culturally perceived, based upon our models of perception. Intertwined into the performance, a recipe becomes a metaphor - tasty, strong, spicy and occasionally considered problematic.
