Magdolene Dykstra: Mark-Making, 2022-2024
Emerging from a desire to be seen on my own terms, my mark-making practice blends references to Colour Field painting and cave paintings. Just as prehistoric artists recorded their presence using pigments of the Earth, my finger paintings record my presence with a simple, yet persistent gesture. Using soil, clay, and naturally occurring oxides, these paintings connect me to the earliest artists who used these materials to record their existence on cave walls. Until the 1960s, Canadian immigration policy explicitly favored people of European descent. The legacy of this policy is visible in most rooms I enter. It reminds me, an Egyptian Canadian, that whiteness was the goal for my country. This work occupies the tension between individuality and collectivity, visibility and opacity. While my fingerprint is one of the most individual marks I can make, it allows me to assert my presence without revealing any of the complexities of my interior self.
My fingerprint, the most individual mark I can make, is a universal one, shared among all humans. My mark-making practice has become a way for me to make space for other members of historically marginalized communities to join me in transforming white spaces by recording our presence. Together we transform the gallery by repeatedly pressing our fingers onto the walls. Each of the painters’ marks are present throughout each painting, with no individual laying claim to a specific region. While the particularities of our lived experiences suggest boundaries between us, joining together to create these site-specific paintings provides a way to visualize and enact a shared humanity.
Captions
- Between the two, 2022, site-specific installation at A-B Projects, red iron oxide, acrylic medium, terracotta, and plexiglass, 8ft x 13ft x 11ft
- Patterns of Visibility (vinyl wallpaper) and Beyond Visible (video), 2023, site-specific installation at A Space Gallery, 10ft x 12ft, Photo credit: Selina Whittaker
- Beyond Visible, 2022, stills from video performance, duration: 19 minutes, 25 seconds.
- “various positions of striving, flourishing, and becoming”, 2024, site-specific installation at Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, iron oxide and acrylic medium, 14ft x 28ft
- Exchanging Presence, 2024, site-specific installation at Art Gallery of Burlington with community engagement, iron oxides, acrylic medium, terra cotta, red clay, found objects, 10.5ft x 22ft x 22ft, Photo credit: Jimmy Limit
