Red and White and Black and Gold Michele Pearson Clarke

Red and White and Black and Gold locates the archive within the emotional and political conditions of displacement. Fifty years after Hasely Crawford won Trinidad and Tobago’s first Olympic gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Games, Michèle Pearson Clarke centres familial archival footage of Crawford’s victory in the men’s 100-metre race as a site of diasporic grief. Drawing upon archival documentation of multiple moments of national achievement and shared experience, the work positions such footage not only as historical document but as an affective site through which collective memory, national belonging, and geographic distance are continually negotiated. Red and White and Black and Gold approaches this tension through an autoethnographic lens, attending to the paradox through which the archival image becomes both a means of participation and a reminder of absence, a vessel through which collective history and personal grief converge. Through repetition, transcribed sound, and sonic performance, the immersive media installation reassembles communal experience through fragments: a race replayed, a national figure recognized, a gesture repeated, a sound remembered, fellowship recorded through public imagery. Crawford’s victory becomes a point of departure for thinking about the ways diasporic feeling is intensified when the histories through which we understand ourselves are geographically, temporally, or culturally out of reach. Returning to these fragments across time, the work asks how recorded moments of national feeling continue to act upon those who encounter them from elsewhere, and how joy, longing, grief, and belonging can come to occupy the same image.

Sensational Listening Sessions is an evening at the intersection of sound, visual art, and collective making designed in response to Michelle Pearson Clarke's exhibition at Artspeak Gallery on the occasion of Design Vancouver Festival. Participants are asked to think through the concept of collective memory, how cross-modal perception, sensation, and shared experience can be held, shaped, and made tangible, and are invited into a hands-on design workshop to build a collective vessel in response to the exhibit. 

The Ryze is a channel for collective listening, creating DJ programs, sonic installations, and curatorial collaborations that foreground global artists and sound cultures. Founded in 2020 by JOMA Studios, The Ryze is helmed by Jefferson Aladé, and in 2025, the addition of two residents Losso Silva and Kristen Liston, The collective is concerned with visual design, creative direction, design research, music curation, and program development.