They Said We're Invisible So They Can't Hurt Us
Diasporic meaning making constructs identities, histories and messages experienced through nature, ancestry, religion, spirituality, and Black geographies that are constantly evolving.
Working with black and black adjacent pigments, colors that allude to space, wombs, and the primordial, I reconsider the dominant cosmologies of birth and death. Considering the historical and contemporary threats to Black folks’ afterlives, the teleologies of one's soul/ spirit, I make inquiries into the terror of enslavement extending beyond physical life. Further questions concern marronage and legacies of freedom. Where and how does one find refuge? What are the means towards a free existence? Have we been conditioned to fear and disconnect from these traumatic events even as they continue to engage with us? Are these spaces deep confluences and waterways where light is not meant to reach?
Notwithstanding the discomfort these artistic congregations may engender, I invite you to question the traumas and the histories of violence that have prevented us from alternate ways of knowing and hindered our extra sensory perception and other modes of making meaning.
My hope is that this work helps you to reassess ways of seeing, expands communal remembrance, and activates psycho-spiritual and ancestral reclamation.
Working with black and black adjacent pigments, colors that allude to space, wombs, and the primordial, I reconsider the dominant cosmologies of birth and death. Considering the historical and contemporary threats to Black folks’ afterlives, the teleologies of one's soul/ spirit, I make inquiries into the terror of enslavement extending beyond physical life. Further questions concern marronage and legacies of freedom. Where and how does one find refuge? What are the means towards a free existence? Have we been conditioned to fear and disconnect from these traumatic events even as they continue to engage with us? Are these spaces deep confluences and waterways where light is not meant to reach?
Notwithstanding the discomfort these artistic congregations may engender, I invite you to question the traumas and the histories of violence that have prevented us from alternate ways of knowing and hindered our extra sensory perception and other modes of making meaning.
My hope is that this work helps you to reassess ways of seeing, expands communal remembrance, and activates psycho-spiritual and ancestral reclamation.