The success of our system of memory is the ease in which it can slowly be renegotiated over time, but hold onto things we’ve learned. We are able to function because we don’t have to learn to walk everyday. Every step is simply an adjustment to the initial calibration. This extends to the way we shape our identity

The cultural codes that we grow up with can be renegotiated to accommodate things like  changes in fashion, or paying for plastic grocery bags. However when we find ourselves in a moment of immense and sudden change, it can be like learning how to walk again.Dagmara Genda and Marigold Santos work within this calibration state, both having immigrated to Canada at young age,The artist rely on this sense of two identities to create their images.

In Genda’s works, The Palace of Culture and Science building twists and turns into a massive tangle of flesh and hair. The drawing is created in a layering process. The impression of the image is  loosely traced onto the page and then whited out in certain areas. While the white paint is meant to obscure, it leaves its own three dimensional surface on the paper. Genda works with the resulting mark, tracing over it in pen and building it into the composition, both emphasizing and obscuring the mark.The same way covering over a bump in the wall with wallpaper might hide the bump from one angle but expose it at another.

Santos images look as if they are composed out of characters from folk tales. In one drawing there is a figure made up of earth,stone,and grass. In another there are multiple young women,who have been bisected at the waist, being pulled into the clouds. There is also a layering in Santos work that is achieved through black light. Some figures are there, but have been painted over and pushed into the background, while other areas of the drawing are brought forward by the black light.

Genda and Santos bring us into the state of flux between two realities and hold us there. Rather than seeing one thing or another, we continually see both as one image. When looking at the compositions as a whole I was reminded of a term that has come out of BoingBoing, The “Happy mutant.” I interpreted  Happy mutant as a realization that one is made up of several cultural codes both at the social and genetic level and that one should be in a continual state of flux grabbing every thing that makes sense to the individual to grow,change and adapt. 

Genda & Santos work is up at Modernfuel Artist Run Centre, in Kingston, until October 23rd