On the Paradox of the Unrepresentable: The Trauma Narratives in Robert Houle’s Sandy Bay Residential School Series and Wayne Dunkley’s #whatdoyoufeelwhen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the artworks Sandy Bay Residential School Series (2009) by Robert Houle and #whatdoyoufeelwhen (2018) by Wayne Dunkley, respectively, two contemporary Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) visual artists based in Canada who call into question specific historical acts of colonial and racial violence. These works provide a means to reckon with the trauma of two important historical moments that have been omitted from Canada’s historical records. I argue that these narratives of trauma can be conveyed and witnessed through visual art. While Houle’s paintings illustrate his recollections of his traumatic childhood in the Canadian residential school system, Dunkley’s photo-based art project confronts viewers with his digitally altered self-portrait series resembling 17th Century drawings of runaway slaves in Canada. This paper questions how these artworks, as narrations of past traumatic injustices, provoke critical questions about the haunted present. I argue that these two visual artworks afford viewers a means to reckon with different trauma narratives through the paradox of the unrepresentable hauntings that unsettle the viewer in the artists’ lived experiences through intersections of memory. The trauma from these historical events can paradoxically, in turn, be alluded to multidirectionally, as conceptualized by Michael Rothberg (2009) across cultures to resonate both with and against each other to echo the importance of learning about multiple injustices as constellations of memory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".