the space I am in: CONJURING 2018
Curated by Tavia La Follette
Description
Curated by Tavia La Follette
Artist Statement
When existence is [in]formed by death one must conjure out of form to survive.
This work is a dialogue between black women and environment. Informed by collapse and time. To survive, one must know space.
I dream about black women. How we are constantly informed by our nature.
This nature encourages an understanding out of form.
So. What is “erasure” and what is a “conjuring” – and how might those lines overlap? How attached can we be in these interspaces? Even the space of body. There is repetition, returning again and again to a place to [re]build. What conjuring is used? Not just to survive but strive.
Audio excerpts from Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston
Read by Anqwenique Wingfield
Special thanks to Heather White and Artist Image Resource
Alisha B. Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the black womxn lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression, creating an object, a sculpture, a billboard, performance, or film and thrives in collaboration. Recent exhibitions, projects and public art commissions in partnership with; the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Southbank Arts London, Times Square Arts and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Wormsley’s project, There Are Black People In the Future, gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification and was also awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab and the Goethe Institute. In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black creative mothers called Sibyls Shrine, which has received two years of support from the Heinz Endowments. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, an Awardee of the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant, the Carol Brown Achievement award among others. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and currently is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.