Visbilizing the layered truth: Two new projects
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Two project updates for you today, wherein I got to be a small part of much larger collaborations, both of whose deep and radical methodologies of care I really respect and have been learning from.
Epilogue: an Exhibition
Artwork from my new zine "(Not) Ready" will be featured in an exhibit at the ILY2 Too gallery space in Portland, Oregon!
Epilogue is an exhibit on the topics of houselessness and home, in continuation with the comics anthology project Changing the Narrative of student stories from 2022, wherein I got the honor of helping to tell Daniela's story. In 2023, I got to be interviewed as part of the Changing the Narrative team's "arts-based impact assessment" of the initial project. (Basically, the team was like: we don't just want to do a survey...how can we make more art, pay participants, and keep engaging with this project in an ongoing way, and in relationship?)(I also got to co-interview lead researcher Kacy McKinney, with Daniela, which was so much fun!) In addition to interviews, we were also invited to make art in response to the creative reflection prompt: "How has Changing the Narrative impacted you, personally, professionally, and/or creatively?"
The exhibit runs from April 13 - May 11, and you can check out the show during gallery hours. The opening event will happen tonight April 13 from 4-7 pm and a closing event on May 11 from 4-7 pm. I will be there for a collaborator party (including zinesters like myself tabling!) on April 27th from 4-7 pm. I have seen a sneak peek of the artwork in the show, and it is all stunning — across a variety of mediums from more comics to textiles to ceramics.
A third-run printing of Changing the Narrative and an exhibition book for Epilogue will also be available to fill in more details about the project, the methodology, and all of the beautiful artwork! I really respect the ways that the project team has created and moved through this entire collaborative experience — which feels like as much of the lasting ripple-effect impacts as the final artwork.
If you're in Portland, swing through! If you want to follow the Changing the Narrative project, sign up for their newsletter.
I'll put my story "(Not) Ready" online for reading and can share more of the context after the exhibit closes in May. In the zine, I use color to visibilize the ways trauma and housing insecurity can change a 'single' story's telling. In the writing, I want to give compassion, dignity, and permission to all the stories that are too hard to tell just yet — and which therefore might not even make it into the record/archives/overarching survey.
Reading Work: a Daily Method
Last year, Xaviera Simmons Studio invited artists to sign up to read and respond to works 'contemplating the mechanics of the carceral state and new imaginings' in the books:
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide by Dylan Rodriguez
Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons edited by Colin Kaepernick
We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang
My creative response to Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments went live on March 15th. It is a layered piece that juxtaposes images and labels that we apply to teenage girls (to great consequence!) — again fracturing story across multiple lenses to visibilize the ways that our view of each other is informed and biased by dominant systems, cultural worldviews, and storylines-that-uphold-the-status-quo which we are fed as truths. And to visibilize the ways that our stories can be expanded/exploded/beautified by possibility models, what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, and our own caring imaginations.
You can view a video recording on the Reading Work website' the original piece was coded in such a way as to make the juxtapositions random, constantly creating new combinations.
Reading Work is meant to be engaged with as a daily method, so follow along on Instagram or on their Website for continued meditations with these themes and imaginings.
As another entryway, I really adore Kean O'Brien's cyanotype response to Angela Y. Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete from January 3rd.
Ongoingness
As these two projects — which both deal with layers of truth — happen to coincide and collide in time in this very newsletter, I can't leave without mentioning Jennifer S. Cheng's essay series on "the poetics and politics of refraction". Giving credit where credit is due: The ideas in her essays have bonked around in my head for ages, creating cracks in my thinking and planting seeds in the mud of my mind, that have been foundational to the creative experimentation that bore fruit for the above expressions.
I have been thinking a lot about 'scaling deep' to impact cultural roots in ecosystem alongside the more readily available paths of 'scaling up' and 'scaling wide'.
And the critical role that art as truth-telling and art as world-making play in 'scaling deep' — and the even more critical yeast that there is unimaginable liberation and power when more of us remember more and more that all of us can be the authors and artists and agents of our own art, thus lives, thus truth, thus the world.
"How do you make art? I eat an orange and consider: there is no way to consume the art of the orange tree without it, however temporarily, becoming a part of me." ~Ismatu Gwendolyn (h/t Kali)
Til we are all free,
Christina
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