July 17 - October 3, 2021
From The Galveston Arts Center:
“About the Exhibitions:
Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice is a multi-layered installation and collaborative performance that intimately displays the exchange between Nastassja Swift and her brother, who is currently incarcerated within the Virginia Department of Corrections. Articulating feelings of absence, erasure, and the personal and communal impact of mass incarceration, Nastassja’s culminating body of work explores her personal experience navigating, as his sister, the past few years of Canaan’s incarceration.
At the heart of the exhibition, Security Blanket includes a 40-foot fabric and glass beaded quilt that serves as both a portal for channeling Canaan’s energy, and a representation of the artist’s feelings of responsibility towards her brother. She questions: “What does my own cell look like?” The oversized blanket looped through the steel fabrication of her brother’s prison cell acknowledges that their communication is both what comforts and consumes her. Measuring 6.5 of his shoes wide, 10 shoes high and 11 shoes long, the quilted room holds space for the artist, and others, to read written letters from loved ones whom they cannot reach due to incarceration. In a purposeful collaboration with her brother, the artist pieces together portraits, collages audio, and curates a space that visualizes the collective weight of confinement.
Home-goings is an exhibition by Houston based contemporary artist and visual activist Irene Antonia Diane Reece featuring photography and installations that explore African American spirituality, Black southern churches, and Black Liberation Theology. The term home-goings describes the traditional funerary practice in the African American Christian church of celebrating the life of those who have passed and sending them on to the afterlife and their motherland. For Reece this practice represents the complexities of protecting Black lives and has become central to her work and life. Through experimentations with imagery from family archives, church objects, and multilayered metaphors and messages, Reece celebrates her family, identity, spirituality, and emphasizes that Black lives are sacred.”
Reception: July 17, 2021 | 6–9 pm
2127 Strand Street
Galveston, 77550 TX
(409) 763-2403
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