What is my work about?
Using a variety of media, I examine how we as a culture and as individuals process our surroundings, how we relate to each other. Specifically, I look at the underlying structures that go unquestioned and are accepted as inevitabilities. I attempt to look at the strategies and language that make this architecture invisible, the seemingly inexhaustible resources (of time, money, effort, and history) used to maintain and cloak it. By exposing what is latent, I want to then offer up the idea that we have and have always had the capacity to choose how we see each other and ourselves. The work takes shape as sculpture, installation, video, photography, or any combination of these based on the specific aspect or nuance of this infrastructure I choose to explore. I am looking for the clearest way to communicate a complex concept and when the project calls for a process with which I?m not familiar, I learn. Perhaps the viewer can intimate this learning and share in a kind of mutual discovery.
Artist Statement
I was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and survived Reaganomics, Jheri curls, and childhood games I had no choice in playing or chance of winning. As I grew up, I repeatedly moved away from and returned to Bed-Stuy, each time jumping orbits further and further away from home; at eight, I moved one neighborhood over but by high school I was as far as Germany. I was a perpetual stranger, a hamster-wheeling autobiographer, remembering, forgetting, and making it up as I went along. With each relocation, I was surprised to encounter projections of “me,” interlopers created in my absence and without notice—a Kambui for every occasion. Others had constructed these versions using complex equations, distilling news feeds, music videos, magazines, and bureau statistics. And when the calculations did not match, I found myself rendered an echo or typo, a misprint or knock off.
It was a long time before I came to understand that the challenges of legibility involved much more than diction and syntax—that the molds, modes, and projections in which I did not properly sit were prescribed by a greater social architecture. The gap between self and these external constructions, once troubling, is now my playground and the locus of where my work begins. I excavate the language and aesthetics of these conventions, bring them out of the world of the implicit to give them gravity, weight, and shape as a way to critique, subvert, and collapse notions of inevitability.
My most recent work–what I hope to be the beginning of a series–addresses the constant manicuring and mediation of contemporary experience vis-à-vis this hidden infrastructure. The Niagara Project is a large-scale outdoor sculpture that references the 1969 dewatering of the world famous Niagara Falls. This drastic intervention was performed to prevent erosion and rock slides so that future generations would be able to consume them in their present state for many years to come. To divert, interrupt, manipulate, then re-channel the force of the falls parallels the mitigation of experience of the marginal and the undesirable in order to guarantee aesthetic and psychic cohesion.
Another metaphorical exploration of constructed conventions can be found in the sculpture and performance, Finding and Forgetting. The work revisits the dance-a-thons of yesteryear to investigate notions of potential and capacity, the ties between spectacle and labor, and the social and political confines that dictated the rules of these contests, as well as the subsequent defiance of these rules by disadvantaged populations–namely women and the lower class.
Approaching the phenomenon from a different angle, both A Life in Pictures and We Became Statues look at specific outcomes of these pervasive ideas and ubiquitous systems. The former examines the movement away from the tangible as digital social media becomes the primary mode of social exchange, while the latter addresses the mental health network in New York City and its systematic abstraction of the individual.
Whether the work manifests glass ceilings into towering dams or demonstrates the way we as a society refract and fragment a population to make way for absolution, then forgetting, the terminus is always the same. I am tirelessly looking to expose that which is latent and offering up the idea that we have, and have always had, the capacity to choose how we see each other and ourselves.
CV
EDUCATION
2013
MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, NY
2006
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME
2002
BFA, Parsons School of Design, NY
RESIDENCIES
2014
Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia, MN
2013
Tropical Lab 7, Singapore
2011
The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY
2009
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE
Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM
2009-07
Fine Arts Work Center (2nd Year Fellow), Provincetown, MA
Apex Art’s Outbound Residency to Kellerberrin, Australia
COMMISSIONS / AWARDS
2014
FSP/ Jerome Fellowship
2013
A Blade of Grass, Artist File Grantee, New York, NY
2010
Art in General’s New Works Commission, New York, NY
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2014
A Life in Pictures MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, MA
2011
Love to Lose, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2010
Wayward North, Art in General, New York, NY
2008
Winter in America, de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA
The Clouds Are After Me, Meyers Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH; Branch Gallery, Durham, NC; and Main Gallery, Las Vegas, NV
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
Crossing Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Performing for Cyclops, The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI
2013
Mnemonikos, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, Thailand
Rapid Pulse: International Performance Art Festival, Defibrillator, Chicago, IL
2011
Pictures are Words-Not-Unknown, Lishui Museum of Photography, Lishui City, China
Crown Heights Gold, The Skylight Gallery, New York, NY
The Bank and Trust Show, Arts Westchester, White Plains, NY
The Black Portrait, Rush Arts Gallery, New York, NY
2010
StreetWise, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
On Screen: Global Intimacy, Krannert Muesum of Art, Urbana-Champaign, IL
Bermuda National Gallery, Hamilton, Bermuda
Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico
New Galerie, Paris, France
2010-09
Fax, The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Para/Site, Hong Kong, China; and Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD
2008
Videocracy, The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, Prague, Czech Republic
Video Form, Form, London, England
2007
Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Float, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY
Night Vision, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Dark Matters, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Black Light/ White Noise Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX
SELECTED ARTICLES / REVIEWS
2014
Modern Painters February, 2014 pp. 46-47
2013
Studio Winter/Spring p. 34
Transition Issue III pp. 176, 179
2011
The New York Times April 24, 2011 p. E43
KQED Arts February 11, 2011
2010
Modern Painters June 17, 2010
ArtSlant June 6, 2010
The Village Voice May 2, 2010 p. 29
2009
Culturebot July 1, 2009
2008
The Herald Sun October 12, 2008, p. 61
Indy Weekly October 22, 2008, p. 46
The New York Times January 6, 2008, p. AR18
2007
Art iT Japan Summer/Fall 2007, pp. 90-91
Art US Winter, issue 20, pp. 58-59
Art Houston July 2007, p. 38
Hartford Advocate November 22-28, p. 31
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY / PUBLICATIONS
2013
Mnemonikos Wada, Yoshika, Gridthiya Gaweewong. Bangkok, Thailand: 98-100
Artist Files Grady, Elizabeth. New York: A Blade of Grass: 66-69.
2012
Wayward North Exhibition monograph. New York: Art in General.
2009
Fax Ribas, Joao. New York: Independent Curatorial International: 114.
2007
The Lost River’s Dreamers Index Exhibition monograph. Hartford: Real Art Way.
2006
Frequency Golden, Thelma. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem: 88-9.
California Biennial Armstrong, Elizabeth, Rita Gonzalez, Karen Moss. Newport Beach:
Orange County Museum of Art: 155.
Winter in America Monograph. Oakland: 81Press. [Collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas].
Walk the Plank Exhibition Monograph. New York: Gallery 138.
Saturday Night Sunday Morning Willis, Deborah. Irvington: Hylas Publishing.
2003
25 Under 25 Hill, Iris Tillman, Tom Rankin, Lauren Greenfield. Brooklyn:
powerHouse Books.
2000
Reflections in Black Willis, Deborah. New York: W.W. Norton
We Became Statues, 2013 Video excerpt