“INTERCESSION,” a meditation on personal and community agency, started as a response to the current war in Gaza. The exhibition asks, “How do we navigate when we begin to question who and what we understand? Is there a way to speak, when both speaking and being silent are equally volatile positions?” The photographic work of Alonso Nichols, Philip C. Keith, Sam Williams and Lauren Miller at the New Art Center’s Corridor at Trio Gallery in Newton, Massachusetts, explores these questions through three types of artistic practice: chronicling, projecting personhood and memory of space.
As a genre of art, documentation, or the act of chronicling life within Black communities is overdetermined by the erasure and indignity caused by the history of enslavement. The inspirational oratory of abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, documented in revolutionary newspapers, began to refute racist assumptions of people of African descent and affirmed expanded worldviews, aesthetic practices and spiritual beliefs. To intercede is to remain visible, to declare “we are still here” and we matter.
FOR ALONSO NICHOLS, NOTIONS OF PLACE ARE DEEPLY PERSONAL.
Much of his work is inspired by stories told by relatives or by memories of figures in his grandmother’s photo album. Nichols was particularly drawn to an heirloom holding an image of his third-great grandparents, Richard and Emeline Griffin, who came out of enslavement in Virginia and settled in Smoketown in Louisville, Kentucky. As part of his own migration from the south to the north, to fulfill his mother’s desire for her children to get an education, Nichols pursued literature at University of California Irvine before moving to Boston and receiving his MFA in photography from Tufts University.
Nichols’s mixed media work consists of digitally collaged images from multiple blocks in his old neighborhood. Rather than stitching together elements end to end, as a moment in time, he chooses to collapse time by selecting images from multiple time periods, metaphors for transformations of physical space or mutations of temporal memory. Fragments of passing cars and aged buildings echo the fragmentation and displacement caused by time and deterioration, urban renewal and gentrification. altogether and learned to capture the materials he needed in another way. This crisis of circumstance opened a new approach to photographic production.
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