The show opened March 3, 2016. I showed two series of work: the "Cuts and Burns" series I have been working on for about a year and this newer series of photo-montage work that consists of juxtaposing images to create alternative narratives.
“Fatalism
and Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything” is a
photo-montage that uses two images: one of a story written by the
artist’s brother as a young child and saved by their mother; and two of
the same brother as a teenager captured in the middle of the act of
dunking. The piece questions which of these images in the fairy-tale,
the act of the boy attempting to fly, or the story of the boy with the
fatalistic future, surprisingly imagined by a young boy himself. The
piece re-creates a tension between the hope and hopeless often
experienced in the growing up of black boyhood.
These photo-montages are a series that explores images from the Danish archives of the Danish West Indies and juxtaposes them with images from the personal archives and albums of the artist. They included images of the artist as an infant in the Virgin Islands and young child in Wisconsin while her father went to seminary school. There is an image of her mother carrying her youngest brother and an image of her father who was a Moravian and later an Anglican priest. The narratives embedded in the images become collapsed, converted, contested and re-imagined in the simple gesture of juxtaposition and/or adding captions to the images. Most of the captions are directly from the archives and then text is added to incorporate another layer to the narrative.
