Originally commissioned for the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, the installation draws on Brewster’s ongoing exploration of identity, personal history, and diasporic belonging. Working with personal childhood photographs, she employs her signature gel-transfer technique to enlarge and transfer images onto timber panels. Abrasions, gaps, and traces left by the process register the image’s migration from one surface to another, transforming the act of transfer into a metaphor for movement, displacement, and the persistence of recollection.

Inspired by Fred Moten’s lecture Black Optimism / Black Operation and the Child Development Group of Mississippi’s freedom song ‘Da da da da,’ Make Trouble constructs an archival narrative in which childhood becomes a site of possibility. Personal history intersects with broader histories of Black displacement and resilience, while the child emerges as a figure capable of imagining otherwise — of troubling inherited structures and opening space for different futures.

Brewster’s presentation sharpens a defining thread running through Southern Guild’s wider presentation at the fair: the body as both an archive and an agent of transformation.

Additional works by Brewster will also be on view on Southern Guild’s main booth at Armory, Booth 210.