June Clark’s Ode to Rust, Dust, and the Materiality of Memory

I first met June Clark on a damp and rainy April Monday in her studio, nestled in the repurposed basement of an Anglican church in downtown Toronto. The weather seemed to reflect the introspective and steady ambiance within. With her face full of warmth, she greeted me at the large mahogany church doors before walking us into her studio, her wrists jingling with gold clanging bracelets, creating a musical echo as we moved inwards. I notice my fits of eager nerves slowly dissipate as I recognize her requited appreciation. 

Upon my arrival at the studio, I immediately noticed Clark’s sculptures–they stood poised on rust-coated metal plinths with an undeniable presence. Each piece seemed to have found its rightful place, forming a self-curated presentation that could have been an exhibition in of itself. The weathered appearance of the plinths, their rusted surfaces, hinted at the passage of time and the memories they carried along. Atop the plinths sat various domestic objects, some rusted with time, others delicately timeless, placed in precise conversation with one another. In addition to her latest exhibit, June Clark – Photography at Daniel Faria Gallery for the Contact Photography Festival, Clark tells me that she is also preparing for an upcoming display at the Frieze New York art fair.  

Though time defies linearity, I am curious about Clark’s origin story. At once, I sensed her natural story-telling abilities. Her eyes twinkle with nostalgia and wisdom as she recounts the early beginnings of her practice. Deeply rooted in her upbringing in Harlem in the 1940s, Clark’s sense of self and community was profoundly shaped by the vibrant culture and people that surrounded her as a perceptive child growing up just after the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance.

Mounted in the centre of her studio wall, amidst the large-scale installations and sculptures, stood a small and simple photo of an apartment building complex. The antique image hints at a clear ordinary day in New York City. Clark describes how this photograph, taken by government officials in the 1940s in an attempt to document every neighbourhood in the city for tax purposes, serves as a potent memory of Clark’s family home before the devastation of gentrification. Looking at the photograph, Clark’s recollection of her former neighbourhood was as fresh as yesterday. She pointed out each window with exact names and detailed anecdotes of her kin and neighbours who lived in proximity. It was a close-knit community, a place where people looked out for one another, where there was a sense of collective responsibility. Growing up in Harlem as a little girl, Clark reflected on the misconceptions that some people had about her neighbourhood. While she has never been naive of the structural anti-Blackness that pre-conditions Black life, Clark was always acutely aware of the way her community foraged space for tenderness, laughter and play in the wake of a deeply racist society. She shares, “…it was a wonderful, wonderful place to group up. I was just shocked that people thought I’d come from this horrible place, and they were afraid of it.”

The contrast between how the anti-Black world orients around Black children and the interior life that family and community make possible reminds me of scholar Christina Sharpe’s notes on “Beauty Is a Method.” Like Clark, Sharpe grew up in a society that feared the Black populations and made sure Black people felt their contempt and terror. In a town that did not regard Black children as precious, Sharpe recalls, “my mother gave me space to be precious–as in vulnerable, as in cherished.”¹ Sharpe notes that it is through her mother, and what she made possible, that she began to understand beauty as a practice and a method. I hear Clark echo Sharpe’s sentiments as she recounts memories of her parents and their insistence on gathering, celebrating, style and beauty. She tells me, “You would have been so lucky to grow up where I grew up…I’m not so naive to think that the people weren’t struggling or had strife…but my parents threw a lot of parties. I saw a lot of very happy people and it wasn’t just Christmas or celebrations. People got together a lot.” At a time when African Americans were migrating from the South to the North, and in particularly high volumes to Harlem, segregation, housing discrimination, poor working conditions and police violence were at an extreme high. Clark notes that in the midst of these conditions, people still gathered and insisted on creating more livable and sustainable lives by tending to each other.

Across the apartment building photo, I noticed an untitled wide and round mixed-media table installation. The table has a black top and is draped in thick brown yarn around its side, with familial names handwritten in white ink along the circular edge. Each name has a tall white candle before it. I read: “Miss Ruby… Grandpa… Joanne… Daddy… Mommy” and so forth. I began to notice a recurring theme of paying homage to notable figures in her family and community through memory work and object-making. Clark’s practice tends to this work by making meaning out of memory and channeling memory through the process of making. Witnessing Untitled and the apartment photograph alongside each other, I can trace the genealogical references of Clark’s oeuvre. I imagine the table as an altar, a gathering, a reunion, of all the people that have ever loved and nurtured Clark, and ultimately, the spirits that inspire her creative practice into possibility. Through this memory work, Clark provokes generative questions about the relationship between archival materials (both found and sourced), memory, and acts of ritual. Being myself acutely aware that we were situated in a building for worship, these works feel like an extension of a ritualistic act of devotion and gratitude to her kin ancestors. As we stood before the names, the candles, the altar, Clark shares, “They are with me all the time…they keep me grounded.”

Clark’s journey in photography began as a hobby, but it was the encouragement and support of friends that propelled it to new terrain. Living close to Baldwin Street, she found herself in the vicinity of a photography gallery run and co-owned by photographer Laura Jones and her husband, John Philips. Here, Clark encountered the fellow artists that together founded the Women Photography Cooperative, a collective of women artists who were carving out a much-needed space in a field that was predominantly white- and male-dominated. During that era, women faced certain restrictions and barriers in pursuing photography as an art form. One particular challenge they encountered was the limited access to darkrooms, as there were discriminatory exclusionary policies that stood as a significant obstacle for women photographers at the time. Within the Cooperative, the women self-taught and shared skills and material resources amongst each other as they studied admired photographers and rigorously perfected their craft through the Ansel Adams Zone System technique in the gallery’s darkroom.

In 1972, the University of Toronto organized a festival of women in the arts, which became a significant turning point for Clark and her collaborators. Seizing the opportunity, the newly formed Cooperative issued a call for submissions specifically from women artists. The response was overwhelming, with submissions pouring in from across the country. Clark, along with a curatorial collective of eight women, selected works from women photographers and curated an exhibition titled Photographs of Women by Women.² The exhibition not only provided a platform for women photographers to showcase their work but also challenged the prevailing gender dynamics within the art world. It toured nationally, amplifying the artistic vision and exploration of women artists and curators across Canada. As part of their explorations, the Cooperative ventured beyond traditional gallery settings to exhibit artists’ work. They sought out experimental presentation sites, such as the inside of a laundromat in Newfoundland, to challenge the boundaries of where art could be experienced and appreciated. By reimagining exhibition spaces, they brought art directly to communities, blurring the boundaries between everyday life and the elitist gallery milieu. Through collaboration, the Cooperative reimagined unconventional curatorial strategies and exhibition spaces that would agitate the bounds of the contemporary arts landscape at the time.

Clark’s personal photography practice has been long undergirded by the thread of materiality. She has sustained a practice that forefronts experimentation with her approach to analog film photography and image-making. In her installation, Harlem Quilt (1997), which was originally created through an artist residency in 1996-97 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Clark found herself compelled to capture the essence of her former neighbourhood that was straddling a peculiar contradiction of totally unfamiliar yet somehow unchanging. Rather than creating picturesque or scenic images, Clark sought to document the reality of what was in front of her without forefronting her own subjectivity and ego, in attempts to reckon with the places that she once called home. She carried her film camera at her hip, capturing the unfiltered scenes of Harlem. Her choice to capture photos from the hip level was not only an intentional reorientation away from traditional composition framing, but also a desire to avoid hyper-focusing on what the camera was capturing–it was only after processing the film that Clark gained a sense of the images. And only very recently did Clark make the connection that this approach to capturing images at the hip resembled the vantage point of a child witnessing the world before her. 

To further explore her connection to the specificity of place and people, Clark collected a colourful assortment of fabrics from the nearest Goodwill store and repurposed them as the canvas onto which she transferred her photographs. Clark then covered the exhibition room with 300 unique pieces of fabric images, woven together with amber tea string lights across the Museum walls. This artistic approach invites audience members to consider their own proximity to the landscape of Harlem. This act of transferring the images onto the clothes became a way for Clark to create an homage to the ever-changing neighbourhood, as well as a means to grapple with the simultaneous familiarity and unrecognizability of her childhood home.

While Clark was first widely recognized for photography, her practice spans installation, sculpture, collage and printmaking. In American Gothic (2023) she joins domestic objects such as Depression glass pieces with elements from outdoor objects, such as metal shovels and pitchforks. Merging the inside and outside realms of labour serves multiple purposes in Clark’s work. First, it reflects the socio-economic environment Clark was brought up in. Growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s, she was exposed to a labour dynamic that challenged normative gender roles prevalent in the American heteronormative white imagination. In this context, women were expected to fulfill the role of stay-at-home wives, while men were primarily responsible for being the breadwinners of the family. However, Clark’s experience in a working-class family in the United States deviated from this narrative. Black families often had a different understanding of gendered labour, wherein both men and women played significant roles in making ends meet and contributing to the family’s economic well-being. Labour was an integral part of the family-sustaining process, and the division of responsibilities did not adhere to the traditional gender norms imposed and reproduced by the western modernity.

By merging domestic items associated with women’s roles and outdoor objects associated with traditionally men’s labour, Clark’s work prompts critical questions about mainstream and normative understandings of gendered labour. These objects hold meaning as they tell the story of how Black working-class families sustained themselves in America since the 1600s. Her memory infused installation pieces speak to the expansiveness of Black gendering frameworks, labour division and the family unit. As Clark elaborates, “Labour was never separated in my childhood, there was never any separation of the outside and inside… to get rent together and even on the plantation.”

As I inched closer to another untitled mixed-media installation that features a dark and aged metal bowl propped on a rusted metal plinth, I notice a powdery brownish-red substance sprinkled across the surface of the bowl. Clark tells me that this substance is known as red brick dust. Red brick dust holds significant cultural and spiritual symbolism in Clark’s work, reflecting its importance in African American folklore traditions. In the South, it is believed that sprinkling red brick dust on one’s stoop, step, or doorway brings good luck and keeps negativity at bay. Clark sees red brick dust as a symbol of home, connecting her to her roots and heritage. The material carries a rich history in various Indigenous and spiritual traditions across the world. In Hoodoo traditions, for example, spiritual practitioners use red brick dust in combination with herbs and spices to manifest wealth and abundance. It serves as a protective element in these practices. In different parts of the world, such as India, red brick dust also holds spiritual significance to ward off harm and protect homes and property. This tradition aligns with the broader use of herbal medicine for protection in various cultural practices.

For Clark, incorporating red brick dust into her artwork serves as an homage to her family’s practices and ancestral connections. It represents a continuation of the land-based traditions and beliefs that have been passed down through generations. By infusing her work with this symbolic and literal material, Clark imbues it with a sense of spiritual protection, rootedness, and cultural lineages. These installations invoke criticality around labour, gender and race, which calls on a genealogy of Black and African feminist writers, such as Hortense Spillers³ and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí,⁴ that have long spoken back to the futile use of white western gender discourse on Black female subjectivity. Accenting these installations, the quiet scattering of red brick dust is a subtle nod to the wisdom of plant life as communal medicines and protection for those that listen to the land.

As our conversation wound down, I felt as though time had simultaneously stretched and folded into itself. Sitting with Clark, as she recounted intimate stories of her artistic life and political grief, the studio visually and sonically transformed into fertile grounds to register her work through multiple sensibilities. Through this studio listening-looking practice, I am compelled to say that oral story-telling is also an integral part of Clark’s poetics on materiality and memory. Her breadth of temporality, technique and geography allow her work to be rendered as capacious and palpable to many, yet deeply distinct and tethered to particular places and times. In Clark’s visual grammar, the metaphoric and literal are quilted, and quotidian material is alchemized into perfect memory of the personal historical.

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References

Christina Sharpe. “Beauty Is a Method,” e-flux journal (issue 105), December 2019.

Rita Godlevskis. “Laura Jones – A Life of Work: Activism and Advocacy Through the Lens of A Camera,” curated. thecovertcollective, March 2022.

Hortense J. Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection, The John Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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Sarah Edo is a curator and researcher born and based in Toronto. Her work thinks through Black queer diaspora, sensibilities, desire and materiality. Her creative and cultural pursuits are guided and grounded by her experiences in community work, collective study, and intentional relation-building. She has transdisciplinary training in Black and queer feminist cultural production through her Masters in Gender studies at the University of Toronto. Sarah is currently completing a curatorial residency at the Gardiner Ceramics Museum in Toronto.

Instagram: @sarahedooo

1. From Christina Sharpe’s essay “Beauty Is a Method” (2019) e-flux journal, issue 105, December 2019, originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of Brick: A Literary Journal and later published in her latest book, Ordinary Notes (Knopf Canada, 2023).
2. Rita Godlevskis,  “Laura Jones, “A Life of Work: Activism and Advocacy Through the Lens of a Camera,” curated. (The COVERT Collective, March 2022).
3. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987), 64-81.
4. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

This article is published in issue 40.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue