Digital Guide: Breaking the Surface 

Breaking the Surface (2026) emerged through an ongoing series of conversations between artist and curator, held at various points across and along the Atlantic, with the exhibition itself shaped through distance, travel, and discussion.

Racquel often began our meetings speaking about water shortages at her family home in Barbados; waiting for pipes to resume flowing, wondering whether to shower that day or remain salty, chlorinated, or sticky from sweat. What initially felt like casual conversation between us slowly revealed larger questions about water as both material reality, and metaphor: the pressure of the water, water under pressure, and the pressure to perform paradise.

In reflection, these conversations (our meetings) altered our collective thinking about the role of curation within the exhibition process. Racquel notes, that in Beyond Representation In Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019), Carlos Castellano quotes Alex Farquharson’s observation on contemporary curatorial practice as “a shift in the conception of what curators do, from a person who works at some remove from the process of artistic production, to one actively in the thick of it.” 1

In this transatlantic exchange, while Racquel actively produced the work for this exhibition, she noted a multifaceted something being steadily revealed: the development of new work impacted by the process of travel, between Ontario, New Brunswick, and Barbados. A question emerges: as the exhibition ultimately returns to Canada, how has the movement itself become part of the exhibition’s conceptual framework? Without a firm answer, we’re left with a thought: an ongoing negotiation between presence, absence, distance, surface, and immersion.

1 Garrido Castellano, Carlos. Beyond representation in contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, politics, and the public sphere. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 

Racquel Rowe, Refractions

2026, Photography mounted on matte board

“I hope this new work resists stability or recognizable forms – maybe it’s an attempt to distort reality or offer something more than a clear and consumable vision of a place? Or this is an attempt at asking myself and the viewer…what other ways of seeing might be possible when our known surfaces begin to break apart?”

Racquel began exploring these questions more recently, by abstracting video work such as Refractions, where she became enamored with taking recognizable moving images and obscuring them to the point of non-recognition.

Racquel Rowe, Breaking the Surface

2026, Video still

“When conceiving work for Breaking the Surface (2026) I wanted to become a sea spirit and reclaim all of the new developments along the coastline of my regular swimming spots.”

In process of developing this work, how it transformed from this original point of inspiration, Racquel started looking at this ‘cultural kit’ called Bajan Folkways; in it are a series of short explanations about traditions situated within Barbados festival season (crop over). From the text, masquerade practices (alike to Racquel’s desire to become a sea spirit) have traditionally functioned not just as entertainment but historically, as ways for enslaved Africans to maintain connections to ancestors, ritual, and spiritual systems despite colonial suppression: “although I don’t think we touch on these roots nearly enough today, I find it challenging to access or find information about this within the Caribbean context…from my perspective yes there’s folklore in Jamaica and other island’s around duppies, river mothers and spirits etc. but I don’t know where I quite see myself or the work within those cosmologies yet.”

In connection to the essay Pictoral Depictions of the West Indian Landscape in the 18th Century and Early 19th Century; the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Romantic by author Colleen Lewis, Racquel notes a throughline: “I’ve come to an awareness, of how images of the region, and specifically Barbados, were historically constructed through ideas of the ‘picturesque and sublime’. Lewis writes that these landscapes (landscape paintings, for example) often worked to ‘sanitize’ ‘the real’ by removing, or in some cases, naturalizing what might be deemed uncomfortable or distasteful. This tension sits at the heart of my own relationship with landscape imagery in Barbados…being deeply drawn to the sea, the horizon line, the overwhelming beauty of the island, but also uneasy, suspicious, aware of the ease with which these images slip into fantasy – so how, does the underwater work begin to disrupt or interrupt the clarity of images? When the water physically distorts perspective, fragmenting bodies and movement, and blurring the horizon.”