February 2023 - Black Invention in 3 Parts
Black Invention in 3 Parts
February 2nd - 25th, 2023
Winter/Covid-19 Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 11am–4pm
Brittney Frantece brings Black Invention in 3 Parts to Soil Art Gallery, Feb 2-25th. Opening Reception is on Thursday, February 2 at 5pm.
The show will run until February 25th.
The show presents speculative, surreal, and ethereal literary and visual arts by J K Chukwu, August Oaks, and Frantece. Through storytelling and multimedia installations, the show honors and takes up Hortense Spillers’s— the phenomenal Black feminist literary and cultural critic— notion of inventing oneself despite living in a world that is so ready to define Blackness without our input. We take part in collective Black imaginations and our ability to create alternative and otherworldly Black beings and existences. A self in one’s own image. Perhaps even a truer image.
Black Invention in 3 Parts journeys through three sections. “The Underworlds” showcases works that portray Blackness in the underworlds. Rebuking Blackness as evil to support racists tropes, this room engages in imaginative play by contemplating how Blackness can exist in Hell, darkness, and underground. “In Space,” will showcase Blackness as existing in the cosmos and on exoplanets, like Europa, Venus, Kepler, and other places inside/ outside of our solar system or galaxy. It imagines what these worlds can look like and how Blackness is embodied in these cosmic worlds. And keeping with space but going beyond into an unfathomable place, “Black Holes” demonstrates the intimacy of knowing Blackness. How can Blackness exist when it’s off limits to those who are not part of the culture? Black holes are phenomena that can’t be understood through normative ways of knowing— much like how one can think about Blackness. “Black Hole” invokes sacred intimacy, secrets, and opacity. Together these sections invite viewers, especially and primarily Black viewers, to unleash their otherworldly imaginations and travel with the artists outside of this world.
About the artists:
Black Invention in 3 Parts is curated by Brittney Frantece. She is a writer, artist, writing educator, curator, and Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington (UW), specializing in Black speculative literary and visual arts. She explores this archive to examine the new ways of thinking, being, and knowledge productions Black imaginations offer. She has conducted workshops and course for UW, Seattle Community Colleges, The Northwest School, and the Henry Art Gallery. Her writing has appeared in Variable West, Black Embodiments Studios Journals, Hawai‘i Review chapbooks, and various art writing collections. She curated Portraits of Ecstatic Feeling: Al Smith Collection (2022) for MOHAI and Queer Imaginations (2021) at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle.
J K Chukwu is a writer and visual artist from the Midwest. Her debut novel, The Unfortunates, will be published by Mariner Books in 2023. She contributed to Of This Our Country, a non-fiction collection exploring Nigeria through its writers, released by The Borough Press in the UK. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a BA from the University of Chicago. She was a 2019 Lambda Fellow and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and TAYO. She has presented her writing and art at University of Wisconsin-Madison, National Louis University, The University of Manchester, and elsewhere.
August Oaks is a Portland based filmmaker, photographer, set designer and installation artist. His surreal, yet realistic works show a dedication to exploring historical legacies and imagination in timely, experimental aesthetics. He designs sets and props for multiple productions and exhibition, including The Giver at La Salle Catholic College Preparatory, Queer Imagination at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and other theatrical and learning environments.
