In her practice, Jaime Black-Morsette often turns to the trace as a central motif, drawing out intertwined histories of oppression and resilience. The themes explored in this artist project, “presence,” emerged from her impactful REDdress project, now a potent symbol for MMIWG2S+, and have since evolved into a broader meditation on the body’s index as a persistent marker of resistance against erasure.
Jaime Black-Morsette
Jaime Black-Morsette is a Red River Métis artist and activist, with family scrip signed in the community of St Andrews, Manitoba. Jaime lives and works on her home territory near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Founder of The REDress project in 2009, Black-Morsette has been using their art practice as a way to gather community and create action and change around the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls across Turtle Island for over a decade. Black-Morsette’s interdisciplinary art practice includes immersive film and video, installation art, photography and performance art practices. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, place and resistance.
Traces act as evidence of repression, dispersion, unlikely affinities, secret histories, kinship, and artistic lineages.