Lore and Sentiment: Welsey Chavis and Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

How do we hold onto the traces of Black life that transpire in intimate, even spiritual, realms of experience? For writer Toni Morrison, the answer lies in looking to forms of knowledge and culture often denigrated by Western society. She writes: "If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the West, it must centralize and animate information discredited by the West—discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people, information dismissed as ‘lore’ or ’gossip’ or ’magic’ or ’sentiment.’"

Lore and Sentiment is a two-person exhibition of recent photography, sculpture, and writing by artists Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. and Wesley Chavis. In this exhibition, Chavis and Brown Jr. weave stories that honor and embrace the lore and sentiment invoked in Morrison’s words. This exhibition is the culmination of a five-year creative dialogue that began in 2019, when Chavis and Brown Jr. traveled to Jamestown, Texas, to visit the Chavis family’s ancestral homestead. Lore and Sentiment emerges from the influence of that trip on the artists’ friendship and recent practice.

In Chavis’s work a sensation of touch resonates through new experimental writing published in his first poetry collection, Big Wrap, Forearm. His poems and spiritual appeals delve into intersecting themes of religious devotion, queer longing, and physical intimacy. Audio recordings of passages read by people who inspired the collection are presented in the gallery along with vinyl prints excerpted from the publication. During the opening reception for Lore and Sentiment, Chavis will read passages from Big Wrap, Forearm and a book release will take place during the closing weekend.

​​Brown Jr. presents a selection of photographs and a new UV-printed embossed resin sculpture. The photographs were made in a private booth at a gay adult theater in East Elmhurst, Queens, a McDonald’s restroom and in the door window pane at the artist’s apartment building. Much of Elliott’s work, especially when narrative, has dealt with occlusive compositions in relation to privacy and intimate care for their subjects. On KAJE’s second floor, Brown Jr. presents a digitized archive of pornographic videos from the private collection of Alan Bell, an artist and publisher who in 1986 founded Black Jack, a Black gay men’s safer sex club based in Los Angeles amid the AIDS crisis in the United States.