Rebecca Bair
If I Wished My Hair Was Longer
About the Artwork
Rebecca Bair’s work has garnered acclaim for its innovative approach to portraiture, conveying a lived and embodied experience of Black womanhood without ever revealing a body in the frame: a response to the violence of ethnographic and eroticised photography inflicted on the Black body. Bair achieves her sensitive, non-figural representation by turning her lens onto hair, and embracing sunlight as her collaborator. These two formative pillars – hair and sunlight – are both gorgeously rendered in If I Wished My Hair Was Longer, a self-portrait that glimpses the artist’s shoulder. Amber sunlight spills onto Bair’s skin, washing it in shadows that enshroud her while richly depicting her curls. Against a black background, the work treads a delicate line between figuration and abstraction, engaging and evading the camera in a single, profound gesture.
If I Wished My Hair Was Longer
2022
Inkjet print mounted on dibond
Edition of 3
36” x 60”
Estimate: $8,500
Courtesy the artist
Please Note: This work has a reserve price of $7,000. The work will be available for collection in February 2024.
About Rebecca Bair
Rebecca Bair (b. 1995, Toronto, ON) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver – the traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Bair uses multimedia approaches and sun collaborations to illustrate her exploration of identity and intersectionality, through the lens of her own experience as a Black Woman on Turtle Island. Her artistic, professional and educational goals revolve around common themes of celebrating Black plurality, as well as enabling interpersonal and intercultural care, and her work acts as a vehicle through which the complexities of history and identity can be uncovered, redefined and expressed. Her work was recently featured in the solo exhibition Rebecca Bair: Deep Conditioning at the West Vancouver Museum (2022), as well as the two-person exhibition Together / Apart at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2022). Bair is a laureate of the 2022 Portfolio Prize, a two-time finalist for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, and the co-founder of The Black Arts Centre, Metro Vancouver’s first Black-owned and operated artist-run centre.
