Untitled by Jiahao

Statement

I and some classmates visited and viewed the Fraser Family Fonds at the University of Toronto Archive. I specifically focused on taking photocopies of the amateur art and sketches produced by Frieda Fraser and sifting through her private journals and other belongings. Frieda Fraser's same-sex relationship with Edith (Bud) Bickerton Williams is documented and preserved in the archive, along with other aspects of her inner life and artistic practice.

Because the inner life and artistic practice (Mckinney et al.) of historical figures are often transient and ephemeral, and because of institutional negligence and repression, these narratives of lesbian lives are often hard to recover. Following the threads of her personal drawings, I was inspired to make a digital collage of images and prose to point at fictional narratives (source) that could be contained by the mixing of artistic expressions, metaphors, and historical reference points. However the survival of Fraser's personality and history as a ghost in the archive is not coincidental, especially when contextualized in the vast historical darkness into which most of the queer and lesbian lives have vanished from history's memories as well as the collections.

The archival silence and erasure of queer lives of the past century also coincides with social movements and evolving of the queer and feminist consciousness. The 'textual survival' of respectable white lesbians and queers are merely incomplete glimpses through history's evolving perspectives from second to third wave feminism perspectives, while black queers and lesbians mostly do not survive through text in the same way. Therefore the artist presents Frieda Fraser's wonderful drawings as glimpses in the void and not through an idealized nostalgic lens that is an 'abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming' per Boym.