Brewster, Sandra

The black and white of the photographs and the exuberant scale of their presentation contributes to the metaphorical qualities of this large photographic portrait installation. It's all a blur... is a series of gestural portraits made with photo-based gel transfers. Sandra Brewster uses the medium as a metaphor for movement or change from one place to another, specifically in reference to the migration of her parents and their peers who left Guyana for Toronto in the late 1960s. Inspired by the preciousness of old photographs and their relationship to time and memory, this series mimics and somewhat exaggerates the physical quality of those photographs by revealing imperfections left by creases, tears, and folds. Deeply present in the very process of gel transfer is a meditation on "transfer" itself, so intimately about the transitional qualities of diasporic being. Brewster makes black figures "stick to" perhaps, a white landscape, although unresting. Something is always lost in the transfer. Perhaps the work conveys both movement captured and capture moving.Toronto's Contact Festival awarded Brewster the Gattuso Prize in 2017 for this body of work, and the jury wrote "With It's all a blur... Sandra Brewster takes portraiture in a strongly metaphoric direction. Using a labour-intensive method, the artist creates tactile works suggestive of a number of ideas. While evoking the customary role of the photograph as memento, at the same time, these works appear to call forth the emerging subjects of history. The unavoidable scale, presence, and motion embedded in these still images command the attention of viewers to discover the details and traces left behind by the portrait participants."