Persimmon Blackbridge: Speak No (emergency)
Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC - To March 23
As the Kiss & Tell collective, Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart were an important presence in the North American cultural ecology of the 1980s and ’90s. Through their performances, publications and installations, they helped to clear a space for sex-positive lesbian and queer artists at a time when representations of sexuality were limited at both ends of the political spectrum. As a solo artist, Blackbridge has expanded her socially engaged interest in feminism and disability art to include the effects of the climate crisis.
Organized in partnership with the Toronto non-profit Tangled Art + Disability and curated by Sean Lee, Speak No (emergency) features 150 handmade doll sculptures built with wood and found objects. The particularity of each composition, alone and in concert with others, links to recent climate-related disasters—from the pine beetle epidemic that decimated BC forests in the early 2000s to the 2021 Lytton wildfire that destroyed much of the town and affected First Nations communities nearby. On a global scale, this linkage extends to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that 620,000-square-mile island of plastic waste in the ocean between California and Hawaii.
In addition to her dolls, this show includes a newly commissioned piece by Blackbridge. Fire (fighters) (2025) is a haptic work designed to be touched. Touch is a sense the artist has struggled with due to peripheral neuropathy, a condition summed up rather poignantly in the exhibition press release: “as the nerves in her hands get progressively more numb, her art becomes wilder, freer, and less formal.”
