MATERIAL HISTORIES
The past and present coexist within an intricate tapestry of history, family, traumas, and imagined futures. They are accessible through the physical structures that bind us to both aspirations and memory. Material Histories showcases the work of 2024 Winter/Spring Artists-In-Residence, Johnny Floyd, Asa Jackson, Adrian Rhodes, and Carlie Trosclair, whose practices investigate these echoes of our collective pasts, speaking through the materiality of our cultural landscapes and architectures.
Painter Johnny Floyd examines the Black experience in America through vibrant color. In his figurative paintings, the Black Body is both disconnecting from a historically oppressive gaze and gazing forward into a future in which Blackness is a sustainable condition in the United States. His practice is a process-driven rumination on the intersection of classical mythologies, ancestral connection, modern Black cultural artifacts, and historical records.
Asa Jackson works as a multidisciplinary artist exploring the cross section of textiles
from various countries, peoples, time periods, and personal histories. His artworks weave together the lives of myriad people reflecting their collective and individual stories. Past and present co-exist in the cut and sewn fabrics of Jackson’s visualized biographies.
Adrian Rhodes utilizes printmaking to explore the desire to separate from your past and return to it in the same breath. She creates a framework through repetition in which to sit with the heavy thoughts of grief, the passage of time, the fleeting nature of joy, and the struggle to hold contradictory feelings simultaneously. This iconography-in-ink is about the people who should be in the room and are not there - the presence of absence.
Architecturally influenced multimedia artist Carlie Trosclair transports entire genealogies into the physical realm using latex as an architectural skin. Paper-thin casts reshape the narrative of home as a sturdy, secure space into one that is vulnerable and ephemeral. These ghostlike imprints create a space that is transient and ever changing: both structurally and in our memory. These become the shells we leave behind; Relics of habitation and homemaking.
