featured gallery for March 2019

Introspective Exploration

In The Fire Next Time, spoken by James Baldwin:

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

Introspective Exploration examines interactions of community, space, power, formal theories and faith. They are works that cultivate a sense of freedom and rebellion through spirituality, cultural identity, activism, and queerness that were gathered from remarkable Artist Members in the Visual AIDS Artist+ Registry. Individually and collectively these artists were selected because they removed the veil of perception and revealed underlying meanings of the unseen. These works spark a conversation centered around the complexity of cultural healing, awareness, subjectivity, and correlations of internal limitations and liberation.Their stories create a deep understanding of addressing powerful themes that include personal and universal revelations of healing as I have deep love for those living with HIV, inclusive of queer and trans identities of color.

This gallery is a story book of collective cultural gestures that challenge terms of aesthetics, stitching together many meanings of wholeness, rather than duality. Each artist uses poetic visual languages that address societal and universal issues through reflection. When selecting these particular Artist Members, I only had one thought-process, and that was to gauge works that allowed space for questions that related to personal discoveries of "why’s." Each piece selected honors that very space and the many meanings that come with it, including processes of wholeness that are essentially deemed as broken.

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”- James Baldwin