Teiji Wallace-Lewis - EXPOSURE INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL

“I was 30 years on the farm and hated every minute…” Grandmother said,
as she fed her children despair.

My grandmother, Olive, never wanted to be a farmer's wife. She wanted to travel, paint, and teach. My grandfather promised her this life. A life away from Ontario, Canada. One day, while working at the local steel mill, he left for a secret meeting with his father. He agreed to buy the farm and take over the family dairy business. Olive was assured it was temporary. It would only be two years—to work and save enough money to leave. They moved in shortly after with my great-grandparents and split the house in half. She got to listen to James batter Edna at night. It was not long until Olive gave birth to my uncle, aunt, and mother. My grandfather found himself on that farm. My grandmother lost herself.

~ ~ ~

 Searching for The Faint Flickers of Grace (In the Opposition of Thumbs) sits at the thematic intersection of memory, photography, and “(complex) implication” (Rothberg, 2019). The ongoing project is a relational collaboration between my mother and myself. It grapples with the intergenerational transmission of trauma + privilege ingrained within the worn pages of my grandmother’s family photo album. Mobilizing intaglio and collage techniques, we staged a creative intervention into the album and reclaimed my mother’s stories of childhood turmoil once concealed by Olive’s curation. The work's interwoven content serves as a dualistic form of medial testimony. On the one hand, to bear witness to the three generations of trauma perpetuated by the gendered division of labour on the farm where my mother was raised; on the other hand, an aesthetic caveat to how we remember or forget the “historical privilege” awarded by the family farm and its implication within Canada’s ongoing settler colonialism (Borell et al., 2018).

BIOGRAPHY

Teiji Wallace-Lewis is an independent artist-researcher-storyteller working in the nascent field of memory studies. Between 2021 and 2022, he was shortlisted for the OD Photo Prize (UK), invited to speak at the University of Regina’s Art for Lunch lecture series (CA), presented a paper at the 18th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (US), and had his writing featured on HOAX Publication (UK). In 2023, Teiji received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to present narrative performances at two UK conferences: the Memory Studies Association 7th Annual Conference: Communities and Change and The Storytelling Conference. Over the past two years, his research has resulted in a chapter contribution titled “The Canadian Family Farm: A Case Study of a Settler Colonial lieu de mémoire.” This chapter will be part of the forthcoming Edited Collection, Unsettling Education: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Land, set to be published by Canadian Scholars & Women’s Press in 2024.