Nostos Algos
I work in multiple media to reexamine my coming of age, white in the Jim Crow South, and to use that developing understanding as a lens to view the racism and nativism in America today. My childhood, under the strong influence of a matriarchal grandmother, had one foot in the gloried and faded Southern past. I was unaware of the apartheid existence I lived and of its targeted suppression of African Americans. The stain of racism, the curse of the South, was my heritage. This series of work was begun in 2016 after visiting Alabama for the first time in many years. Nostos Algos, the pain of return, is the etymology of nostalgia. This is the journey I take through my art. My work builds on Michel Foucault’s concept of the materialization of memory. Memory is embedded in objects and materials. I bring together fragments of my own memory and post-memory from family history through photographic images on plates, found objects from my childhood, and objects I have made. Although the narrative in my work is sometimes presented in a linear fashion, my conception of history is not linear and progressive. The racism and violence portrayed across the 20th and 21st centuries are equivalent. My selection of images and objects recontextualizes these elements of memory and creates a fictional, but personal, narrative. My specific experience and memories in this installation form a moment in which others can participate, caught in the forces of the everyday: family, nostalgia, suffocation, blindness, politics, racism, and violence. Each of my works has multiple meanings that are available to the viewer as her own experience deepens.
