Important
Halifax exhibition profiles the legacy
of the Underground Railroad in Canada by
Yuri Dojc
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| photo by Yuri Dojc |
Halifax July 19, 2018 – Halifax’s Anna Leonowens Gallery in downtown Halifax is hosting North is Freedom, an
evocative photo exhibition celebrating the descendants of former American
slaves who fled to Canada in the years before the American Civil War. The show
opens this Monday afternoon.
In
portraits of 24 freedom-seeker descendants – the great-great-grandchildren of
once-enslaved African Americans – Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc explores
Canada’s end of the “Underground Railroad,” a clandestine network of
"conductors" and “stations” that helped some 30,000 men, women,
and children follow the “North Star” to freedom.
Black freedom-seekers settled across Canada, but most came to what is
now Ontario and Nova Scotia. Future generations remained, and North
is Freedom tells their stories - Canadians attuned to their histories
and justly proud of their ancestors' courage.
North is Freedom opens
Monday July 23rd, at the Anna Leonowens
Gallery – 189 Granville Street, Halifax.
The opening reception runs from 5.30pm to 7:00 pm. Mr Yuri Dojc and Ms. Dorothy Abbott (featured descendant and treasurer
of the exhibition supporting Ontario Black Society -OBS), will be at the
gallery at 5:00 to meet with the media.
Yuri Dojc’s
“North Is Freedom” features the great grandchildren of once-enslaved African
Americans who found refuge at the Canadian terminus of the “Underground
Railroad,” a clandestine network of conductors and stations that helped some
30,000 men, women, and children follow the “North Star” to freedom.
Freedom-seekers
who escaped slavery in the United States in the years before the American Civil
War settled across Canada. Future generations remained, and North is Freedom
named after a poem by George Elliott Clarke, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of
Canada, shines a spotlight on the descendants of slaves and reflects on their
cultural memory.
The evocative
photographic series was previously exhibited at the Canadian Embassy in
Washington D.C. and timed to coincide with the opening of the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of African American History and Culture. It was subsequently
showcased at the American Embassy in Ottawa during Black History Month in
honour of Canada’s 150th birthday. It
has also been shown at The Grey Roots Museum in Owen Sound, Ontario
North Is
Freedom’s partnership with the Owen Sound Emancipation Association / OBS has facilitated the show travelling to Nova
Scotia. It honours the descendants living history, heritage, and the enduring
legacy of their ancestors. Their stories are both personal and historical.
In Halifax On Monday:
Dorothy Abbott is currently the volunteer
Treasurer of two NFP organizations in Ontario; the first is the Ontario Black
History Society where she has served on the Board since 2009. The second
organization is the Owen Sound Emancipation Association, where she has been a
board member since early 2000. Abbott’s interest in genealogy and her family’s
origins developed into a passion to recognize and promote Black Canadian
history as it is influenced and affected by her original African roots right
through to the slave trade in the US, Caribbean and Central and South America.
This passion has resulted in several exploratory trips to the southern USA and the
Caribbean to trace her family tree. She will be in Halifax for the opening and
her photograph hangs in the exhibition.
Photographer,
artist and witness, Yuri Dojc’s expansive practice encompasses many kinds of
looking. His multi-lens trajectory has pivoted from an established commercial
photography practice to his current gaze as an artful observer of the vestiges
of history’s most vulnerable.
In 1968, as
Russian tanks were rolling into his native Czechoslovakia, the young student
summering in London became, abruptly, “refugee.” And soon, that status shifted
again, to immigrant, as Dojc made his way to Canada. In the decades
since, the photographer has made Toronto his home, and the world both his
subject and his host.
Dojc is best known
for his observational approach to the past, with its alloy of subjectivities,
empathy, and intimacy. Since the late 1990s, he has been documenting
Slovakia's last living Holocaust survivors and the country’s abandoned
synagogues, schools, and cemeteries for a series called Last Folio. An
international success, this show travels extensively, with major exhibitions in
Rome, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Sao Paulo among others.
In Dojc’s most
recent series, North is Freedom: The Legacy of the Underground
Railroad as in so much of his work, the photographer illustrates the
power of art to convey a narrative that continues to touch us here, now, and
into the future.
North Is Freedom
is partnered with the Owen Sound Emancipation Festival / OBS and is supported
by TD Bank Group, The Embassy of Canada in Washington, D.C. as well as the kind
donation of the printing services courtesy of Epson Canada.
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Yuri Dojc
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Media Preview with the
artist Monday 23 July 5pm at the gallery, or earlier in the day if so desired.
For further information
about the show and Yuri contact Stephen Weir
