Utopian Voyage
Utopian Voyage explores the notion of what it would look like if people of color created their ideal future realities? Afrofuturism lends us the ability to look past our current state and shape a new reality. It is a way of exploring the future and alternate realities, undefined by lasting effects of settler colonialism, through a black cultural lens and an artistic aesthetic. Shaping the world around the idea of agency, is a method of self liberation and healing. The exhibition Utopian Voyage explores three different realities. Each photographer brings their own unique vision to what this could look like.
Albany Andaluz uses photo composites and repurposed materials such as discarded textiles to archive her personal transformations which gives a sense of growth and transitioning. Each work builds upon the last, creating a cumulative narrative of Andaluz’s journey and perhaps future self. The present, future and past seem to be all represented in this work.
Cristina Bartley Dominiguez mirrors and merges symbols from layered performances reclaiming female power and identity. By placing Pre-Columbian and contemporary “artifacts” along with a female icon or gestural movements, she builds upon different foundations of history and allows them to collide. Throughout Bartley’s work you see the woman as a symbol which is a reflection of her intuition as a form of healing.
Asherdé Amoy Gill’s work invokes thoughts of home where Black queer lives are nurtured and allowed to grow. In the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway notes that “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension of oppression, and so of possibility.” Asherde is searching for a new consciousness that can live in and inform her identity.
Utopian Voyage begins to examine the depths of what a utopia could be, by examining the past and reclaiming it to build a better future.
Albany Andaluz uses photo composites and repurposed materials such as discarded textiles to archive her personal transformations which gives a sense of growth and transitioning. Each work builds upon the last, creating a cumulative narrative of Andaluz’s journey and perhaps future self. The present, future and past seem to be all represented in this work.
Cristina Bartley Dominiguez mirrors and merges symbols from layered performances reclaiming female power and identity. By placing Pre-Columbian and contemporary “artifacts” along with a female icon or gestural movements, she builds upon different foundations of history and allows them to collide. Throughout Bartley’s work you see the woman as a symbol which is a reflection of her intuition as a form of healing.
Asherdé Amoy Gill’s work invokes thoughts of home where Black queer lives are nurtured and allowed to grow. In the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway notes that “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension of oppression, and so of possibility.” Asherde is searching for a new consciousness that can live in and inform her identity.
Utopian Voyage begins to examine the depths of what a utopia could be, by examining the past and reclaiming it to build a better future.
