SELECTED INSTALLATION
The Crooked Room (2018), Four Womxn: New Musings on Blackness, Museum of Fine Arts Boston
2024
Inspired by “Four Women,” Nina Simone’s 1966 song of archetypes and stereotypes bestowed upon Black women, this exhibition explores those ideations and connections that transcend geography, age, class, sexuality, and artistry. Through poetry and film, four artists employ a balance of historiography and the radical imaginary to critique tropes and envision an end to the erasure of Blackness.
Crooked Room (2018), As the video begins the viewer hears the voice of Melissa Harris-Perry in the background as she explains the meaning of the crooked room, which is “the consistent lived experience of African-American women walking around in a room where everything you expect to meet at a normal field-perception is always off kilter.” That real political work is trying to find one’s authentic sense of Self in a social, political and historical environment that continuously gives you back crooked images. The Devouts, fictional goddesses created from the prayers of women who remember that they themselves are divine. They wear masks of raven, vulture, deer and bull controlling the gaze, capturing the feeling of divinity, duplicity and detachment. The video is purposefully pixelated and distorted; it glitches and flickers, the images are three-dimensional stereoscopes. Some of the women walk ritualistically in healing circles. They claim space and reverse the distortion of who they are.
Video: 2:57 MIN