Meditate on the Blank Space Below
Created for Direct Path to Detour book and exhibit organized by Takahiro Yamamoto
Meditate on the Blank Space Below is an experimental essay and artwork created for Takahiro Yamamoto’s performance project, Direct Path to Detour, as part of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) TBA:17. It is presented as a diptych and also appears in Yamamoto’s book Direct Path to Detour, which features the essay in a different format. Meditate is one of a number of works where I attempt to use a litany to organize otherwise unruly content. In my studio-based practice my objects often consider Racecraft (the process of producing race as a product of racism), how meaning is constructed, and how ideologies are reproduced over time. They highlight my own agency as author while asking viewers to consider their own roles in present-day race relations.
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Meditate on the Blank Space Below
a. Possibility Models for De/colonized Map Makers
b. How to Navigate the Dis/located Sites of American Blackness
c. Amnesiatic Cartography: Diagramming Diasporas
d. Picking Cotton–100 Exercises in Empathy
e. A Relational Approach to Transnational Identities as Experienced Through the
Embodiment of Void
f. Reconciling the Absence of the Subject Position
g. Legacies of De/segregated Territories: A Field Guide for Hyphenated Ethnographers
h. Baby Got Back! Introducing the Exotic Fetish to Your Parents
i. Beyond Reflection–How to Fall Through a Mirror
j. Curating Fragments: Mining Dis/location
k. Accountability and the Persistence of the Aerial View
l. Before Hot Combs: Pre-Contact Sexuality
m. The Trouble with Semiotics
n. If the Map Is a Mirror You Can Trace My Pulse
o. Curatorial Practice as Bodywork (Between Past and Future Imaginaries)
p. Uncle Ben Comin’ To Dinner–Etiquette for Mixed Company Entertaining
q. Radical Re/presentation as Dis/locations
r. Liberation Aesthetics and Other Stretches for Dismantling Generational Oppression
s. Toward A Sensation of Un/seeing as Believing
t. The Problem with Rand McNally–A Conversation with Black Jesus! and Agnes Martin
u. You Are Here: Google Maps and Ghettoes
v. No Tea, No Shade, My Seat, My Table
w. De/coded: What Black Girlfriends Talk About When They Talk About Love
x. Seeing in the Dark–Maps for Re/appearing
y. A Dialogic Glossary of Terms for Locating the “I” in “Other”
z. No, I Won’t Cornrow Your Fucking Hair for Halloween-A Pocket Guide for Macroaggressions