Choosing the Margins

The spatial metaphor of marginality is an important one for developing a Place-specific art and a Critical Pedagogy of Place. bell hooks (1990) writes of “choosing the margins as a space of radical openness.” Gruenwald (2003b) notes that marginal spaces hold alternative ways of being and give us new language to analyze the dominant culture: “Educational treatments of place must be attentive to the life of the margin.” (p. 632). Whereas conventional education is about empowering people by bringing them into the centre, a critical pedagogy of place identifies and learns from communities of resistance. This way of conceiving knowledge and education that is simultaneously about Decolonization and Reinhabitation has resonances for Place-specific art. “The margin…is both a metaphorical and material space from which relationships of oppression might be reimagined and reshaped” (p. 631) – and a standpoint from which an oppositional worldview is constructed (p. 632).

Relationships between marginality, place, nature and society are explored by Vancouver artist Jin-me Yoon. Her practice is decribed by O’Brian (2001) as pivoting “on the axis created by converging constructions and representations of the body, gender, nationality and ethnicity. Yoon's work examines the insufficiency and instability of labels, revealing their unfixed boundaries and false containments, calling on her own hybrid identity (which includes, not exclusively, woman, artist, mother, Korean-Canadian, teacher) to question the stasis of such categories. Yoon sets up, complicates and deconstructs categorization through autobiographical stagings….”

In the 1991 postcard series ‘’Souvenirs of the Self’’ Yoon explores how she “occupies an invisible space in modern definitions of Canada” (Collins, n.d.). Posing in the picturesque tourist town of Banff, Alberta, in the Rocky mountains, Yoon’s images suggest the race-based exclusions that lurk in the shadows of “Nature” and the national identity. Instead of seeking integration with a dominant culture’s norms and values, Yoon’s work suggests that margins can be chosen as a location from which to speak,. Marginality, moreover, is a site of radical disharmony with the prevailing culture of nature, and its barely hidden subtext of white racial supremacy.

Image at right: Banff Park Museum detail from Souvenirs of the Self , 2001, by Jin-me Yoon. Photograph (C-print), 64.5" x 40". From The University of Lethbridge Art Collection, acquired 2001.

Souvenirs of the Self , 2001, by Jin-me Yoon.

Photograph (C-print) installation.

From The University of Lethbridge Art Collection, acquired 2001.

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