Public Project
Full Of Dreams
The work is inspired by my late-grandmother’s chest x-ray – she died of lung cancer – and the artwork is imaged to resemble an X-ray. An X-ray being a tool used to see beneath the surface to see what ails the body, and the use of the X-ray here presents an inquiry about what happened in these places – what cannot be seen? What cannot be researched?
In asking about my grandmother’s life, I learned that my family is related to one of the oldest documented African American families, the Quanders. Although that family has extensive documentation that can be found and researched, it has proved difficult to find documentation and stories about the Carney family. Most people who would be able to tell me stories passed away when I was a baby. How has my family come to be cast off from the main family? Where were ties broken? How did the Carney family come to reside in Baltimore, Maryland? What roads did we travel? Who has been lost and forgotten? What joys and sorrows were had?
I am left with my imagination to fill in forgotten histories and bonds with loose threads, fears, and dreams. How do we re-member lost history, to put it back together? In a black landscape, visually imaged in this work and experienced in real life - one that is hard to traverse, one that is cracked, unreliable, and muddy – how does one create and uncreate themselves? What will become of me if I am left to imagine, rather than to know, my history?
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