Headbones Gallery, The Drawers

Michaele Jordana Berman, a multiplatform artist, is a name that many know, perhaps from different contexts, for she has excelled in more than one discipline to memorable effect. You may remember her as the sylph-like actress in Stefan Czernecki’s film Green Veridian Green. Then she bowled the Toronto art scene over with her exhibition Oceans of Blood at the Isaacs Gallery in 1976. Her large-scale airbrushed photorealist paintings related to her stay in the Arctic, where she drifted on the ice floes with the Inuit and the narwhal. The National Gallery purchased her monumental painting from this period, I Cry Tears of Blood.. As the lyricist /singer Michaele Jordana in the new wave/punk band The Poles with Doug Pringle (originator of the “electronica” group, Syrinx) her fragile physicality, ethereal looks and riveting performance of songs such as CN Tower are graven into the musical archives of Toronto.

In Berman’s words “I juxtapose and reassemble fragments of my photographic work, transposing images from their original context, to produce composite frames that become frozen moments in time suggesting a larger narrative. Referencing Frontier, one of her Cyborg series in which a young woman is seen in the Canadian Arctic defiantly clutching a Canadian flag, Berman says, ”As countries engage in international subterfuge it will be impossible to determine who is a real flesh and blood human warrior, manning the gates of each country’s disputed territories, and who is a cyborg provided with enough artificial intelligence within its source code to have the capacity to feel, to learn, and to distinguish right from wrong.”