A song drifts out from UNB Art Centre’s West Gallery calling to the curious.

Every year, since 2011, UNB Art Centre celebrates World Water Day by hosting exhibitions themed around water. Previous years have included works created with recycled materials, multi-disciplinary group exhibitions, and performances. This year’s program is dedicated to lens-based work, including Beachcomber.

Like most good things Beachcomber invites us in with soft music then commands the attention of all the senses. Everything, from the low lighting to the dark coloured walls, invites the viewer to slow down. One of the first things those lured into the gallery will notice is two tons of actual sand on the gallery floor. This is all part of Beachcomber, a new solo exhibition by Gary Weekes, and he has a few things to say about what has traveled on nearby waters.

Weekes is a British born fine arts photographer living in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Through his work, he has always been drawn to pulling clarity out of confusion. Other recent bodies of work have explored the stories behind the rings we wear, and the humanity hidden inside a local boxing club. This time, however, Weekes’s camera is focused on New River Beach, with its relationship to the bay of Fundy and, therefore, the Atlantic slave trade.

Beachcomber was born out of a chilling document from 1749, which is also placed in the exhibition. The document, printed on fabric, lists eighteen ships used to transport enslaved Africans. In addition to the ship’s names, it includes the number of humans who were forced on the journey as cargo, and, of course, the value of each ship’s freight. A total of 5950 enslaved Africans is recorded on this document, with their collective value listed at £109,300 pounds sterling–over two hundred and seventy years ago. Accounting for inflation, the cruel appraisal of that many enslaved Africans would be approximately £20 million in British pounds or $34 million in Canadian currency today.

The exhibition is made up of eighteen photographs, but to stop there would be extremely reductive. Ten photographs are hung on the walls and eight are placed on the sand—every piece, branded with the name of a slave ship, references the historic document, and includes the number of Africans packed tightly as cargo on each vessel.

Weekes calls the ten wall-mounted works “sails,” and these are photographs showing New Brunswickers enjoying a day at New River Beach. In every image the fog plays the role of the villain, as if purposely hiding the blue skies and the Bay of Fundy’s history, which leads out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Through frame and photo, sound and sand, a powerful conversation is started the moment you enter UNB Art Centre’s West Gallery. Weekes’s opens an uncomfortable discussion on forced labour, ignored histories, and the beach as a perfect place to play.

Methods clearly matter to Weekes, with levels of intention to be uncovered in every step of the making and presenting this exhibition. From the sand, which was carefully shaped, to the purposefully selected music. It him took over three years and multiple visits to New River Beach to bring this project to life.

Each of the ten ‘sails’ is printed on canvas, echoing the sail-making material of slave ships. Built to endure the roughest winds of the Atlantic, now the material holds firm under our gaze. Every ‘sail’ has bits of red string attached as a crimson reminder to help us reflect on the bloodshed woven into our economy, and the horrible truths that lay hidden in the fog. Yet, like the canvas, history, too, shall weather the whirlwind of our collective amnesia.

Placed on top of stands and set in the sand are eight pieces of work Weekes calls “slabs.” These are photographs of rocks and driftwood arranged by the artist during trips to the beach. While there, he battled winds and waves to stack rocks and wood to create and capture the best picture.

Conceptually, the wood represents the lumber ships were made from, while the rocks are linked to the ballast used in the age of sail. Ballast stones were crucial for maintaining the balance and stability of the ships, helping to keep them from tipping over on long journeys. Weekes’s photographs were printed on cloth and then taken back to New River Beach to be baptised in the waters.

After the baptism, Weekes took the printed works cloth to a factory. There he placed them in a mixture of concrete, silica glass, and epoxy resin, to give the appearance of being underwater, much like in their baptism. Made in part of sand from New River Beach, and weighing twenty to fifty pounds each, the finished ‘slabs’ were installed on the sand in the gallery, giving the feeling that they just washed ashore.

The fog hides more than just blue skies and sunshine in New Brunswick. There’s a mental mist at play when we discuss historical horrors. That’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise that many people still don’t believe slavery happened in Canada, let alone New Brunswick. Let’s just permanently clear that fog before we move on. Below is an artefact from the New Brunswick Provincial Archives–a ballast stone of truth to help stabilize some facts about our history.

It seems the New Brunswick supreme court in Fredericton had a chat about slavery back in 1799—and, after much debate, still couldn’t decide for or against making it illegal. An’¹ so slavery stayed legal and very commonly practiced—right here at the end of the underground railroad.

Seems it’s easy to forget how normalized these systems of oppression were; that people had careers accounting for slave ships’ tortured inventory and enforcing fraud prevention for the highly profitable trade of enslaved Africans

A quick glance at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights web page on Black Slavery² in Canada offers the confession that Canadians enjoy celebrating the Underground Railroad over acknowledging our “long history of slavery, and the legacy of slavery lives on in anti-Black racism in Canada today.” In this way, Weekes brings a global conversation very close to home.

There is a dark irony to the imagery of white beachgoers playing in the fog; especially when we consider that those who benefit from the privilege of ignorance are often the ones who proudly claim that Canada was always slavery free. Through this lens, the sand starts looking more like a post-apocalyptic wasteland than utopian escape from society. Yet, perhaps this is an escape from the truth, with the fog playing the role of blissful ignorance.

A favourite image of mine shows a child standing in water looking to the fog as if sensing something is about to arrive—perhaps these waters are trying to share a memory of what used to travel to these shores through the Bay of Fundy.

While walking through the exhibition, listening to the music, I found myself moved by this conversation between place, history and feeling. How many of us would ever consider a beach a place of violence? With Beachcomber Weekes encourages us to question the false narratives we let cloud our minds, but can we escape the fog that obscures true histories of the places we enjoy?

Many of us have learned to play within the fog; to toss the heavy rocks of truth overboard an’ lose all sense of balance in relation to our history. For too many, the complete history of the Bay of Fundy and New Brunswick’s role in the Atlantic Slave Trade has been lost to the haze of tourism and vacation days.

Weekes helps us to see through the smog by weaving history and creativity into his work. Beachcomber supports the public in remembering important yet heavy truths, which are needed to anchor us all against the danger that blows when ignorance and hatred storm. Let our memories be made of canvas so that we can endure the journey to a land of diversity and inclusion, where a time at the beach can be enjoyed along with the truth.

_________________________

¹ “an’” is a phonetic vernacular alternative to “and” which reflects pronunciation in rural New Brunswick communities like the one in which the writer grew up.

² Human Rights Canada. (n.d.). Black slavery in Canadian history. Retrieved July 18, 2024, from https://humanrights.ca/story/story-black-slavery-canadian-history