absence / assemblage

absence/assemblage is a culmination of works by June T. Sanders and I.

By blurring the line between subject and object, I examine how black women manifest sense of self and acts of self-care — How they work in opposition to the way black women are represented in popular culture. I am painting for a population whose trauma is disproportionately ignored as a result of a complex system of stigma, women who carry the burden of traumatic and harmful experiences from childhood into adulthood and from generation to generation. The absence of bodies references the notion that black women are disposable and unvalued, while the confrontational scale and content of the work dispels this notion and works towards a disruption of social and political paradigms caused when black women practice the radical act of self-care.

ayanna z nayo

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