KARICE MITCHELL: Capture Photography Festival 2023

Karice Mitchell is a Toronto-born, photo-based-installation artist whose practice utilizes found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to the representation of the Black femme body in Western visual culture and pornography. Historically, the sexuality of Black women and femmes has been central to their abuse, exploitation, and oppression and continues to be systematically contrived, misrepresented and controlled in an epistemological order fueled by an ever-pervasive white gaze. By reappropriating erotic images of Black femme subjects, Mitchell reasserts the agency of the Black femme subjects in the frame and subverts a history and narrative from elsewhere that attempts to categorize the Black female body. Thus, a central theme of Mitchell’s images is the reimagining of possibilities for Black femme sexuality outside of the weight and constraints of hegemonic, Eurocentric standards and historical constructs. – Olumoroti George