Toronto artist is ready to make her move
Tau Lewis’s creations explore her Jamaican-Canadian roots and the resulting divisions
Blink and you’ll miss Tau Lewis’s studio, tucked into a below-ground grotto on Niagara St. in Toronto’s west end. That’s true in more ways than one: the building, a century-old brick factory that used to make coffins, is slated for redevelopment as early as the new year, which means Lewis and dozens of others profiting from its breezy occupation regulations (there are studios, workshops, apartments and almost every other kind of use throughout its five storeys) are soon to be its tenants no longer.
Lewis, 23, has applied for a residency in New York, “but I’ll probably start gradually moving there either way,” she says, adding that work is “getting pulled in that direction.”
If she means to larger and larger stages, she’s right. Today, Lewis is in Los Angeles, anxiously cobbling together new work for a show at the Night Gallery there; on Sunday, another show of her work at Downs & Ross will close after a month-long run.
In between, she’s been at New York’s New Museum, making new work for the cutting-edge contemporary institution’s Ragga NYC exhibition, a gathering of artists exploring their Afro-Caribbean roots (her piece, a plaster bust draped with chains, is called Georgia marble marks slave burial sites across America). And in what might amount to her Toronto farewell — for now, at least — she opens yet another show on July 21 at Cooper Cole.
“It’s stressful,” she nods. “But I’m used to it. The good thing is that I don’t have time to second-guess myself. It makes the work super-intuitive. I just cross my fingers and hope things work out.”
In the studio, things are cleaved neatly in two, mirroring Lewis’s practice: On one side, an intimidat- ing mound of materials: fur, fabric, broken concrete, a huge rusty castiron pipe (“I’m attracted to the heaviest things,” she sighs; “I should really start working out”). On the other, a tidy array of reading materials, outfitted with a slim banquette suitable for reclining.
It’s as though industry and contemplation sit quietly alongside one another in balance, a distinction Lewis values. “I work with my hands as much as I do with my brain,” she says. “When I’m putting things to- gether, it’s about touch, and feeling, and weight.”
Weight underpins Lewis’s work in more ways than one. Her father is from Jamaica, and Black; her mother, from Canada, and white. She’s been trying to reconcile the two sides of her hybrid identity most of her life.
In her earlier work, she kept her distance. A show as recently as last October here “was speaking to this very large theme about Black Canadian identity — this dissociation of Black bodies from the natural environment, and I guess this erasure of Black Canadian narratives from Canadian art,” she said.
By February, things had turned much more personal. For a show at 8-11, Lewis built an effigy of herself, as a child, alone in a colourful cinderblock shack that was eventually draped in snow in the gallery’s courtyard. The shack, a typical Caribbean structure at odds with the wintry scene, mirrored the divisions in Lewis’s own mind.
“It was on the same theme: Of Black identity as a kind of DIY, and constantly changing,” she says. “But it was personal. I mean, it was me. And it opened some doors for me.”
As some doors open, others will close, and the studio’s, one way or another, will soon be one of them. But like any expert forager, she knows you can always start again.
“I’ve been really lucky, finding things,” she smiles. But finding her way won’t take much luck at all.