Sep 26 to Dec 20, 2026
I Think This Means I Can Fly
About the Exhibition
In I Think This Means I Can Fly, Anique Jordan considers how truth is made, inherited, and given form. Working across photography, sculpture, and performance, she unsettles the boundary between visual evidence and belief. Jordan asks what becomes possible when ancestral narratives, dreams, and spiritual knowledge are approached as truth-telling systems.
The exhibition grows from Jordan’s research into the Flying Africans, stories of enslaved people who escaped bondage by taking flight, and connections between Gullah Geechee communities of the Carolinas and her family history in Trinidad. These inheritances lead Jordan to question the visual languages through which Truth acquires authority. In the works on view, glitches, shadows, blurs, and disjointed bodies unsettle photography’s promise of visual certainty, closed systems, and stable form. Monumental gridded photographs borrow the structure of devotional displays, inviting us to move between individual scenes and an unstable whole. Four double-sided light boxes create shifting relationships among images and the stories they suggest. In Salt, photographs printed on glass cast shadows beyond their surfaces, extending the work into the surrounding space. Self-portraits explore the forces of flight, while sculptures formed from impressions of Jordan’s body take on human, animal, and otherworldly qualities. Across this body of work, figures multiply, slip out of alignment, and assume shapes that exceed familiar categories.
I Think This Means I Can Fly also debuts Jordan’s durational performance, Flight, informed by Spiritual Shouter Baptist mourning practices. Within this faith, mourning names a period of fasting and seclusion during which dreams and visions become sources of spiritual travel and instruction. Jordan fasts, sleeps, dreams, and writes, approaching bodily experience as a source of ancestral knowledge. The gallery is asked to bend to the body’s rhythms and ways of knowing. Study Hall extends these questions into reading, conversation, and shared study.
Jordan invites us into a world governed by other rules, where history may be dreamed and remembered, belief becomes material, and the marvelous offers its own account of what happened.
About the Artists
Anique Jordan is an artist, writer, and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture, and performance, often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Jordan’s work considers different logics of time, the black surreal and the marvellous as it relates to the black Atlantic experience. Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community-engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited in galleries such as Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Art Gallery of Windsor, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, and in 2017 was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award. Jordan has recently completed her MFA in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design.
