Sam Vernon is one of the artists in the group show: Disguise: Masks & Global African Art
Until Sep 7 2015
Seattle Art Museum
In the realm of folklore, 2012.
STATEMENT 1
I invent mental pictures from what I read and see and try to build a universe on a page out of it—starting with a drawing in pen and ink. I envision a scene, a moment, an environment, to describe. I build these drawings up, adding layers of line over time through an intuitive Xerox and collage process. A collection of images forms. The result is collaboration. Clusters and mounds of images that resemble a dark cloud, a congregation of bodies in a swamp, dancing, sleeping, weeping, haunt my dreams. I think of the leaves of willow trees swaying, rivers, forests, fields, and the spirit of an archetypal southern landscape in black and white. I hear drums and see black feet in rhythm to a song I myself have never sung or fell in movement to. I create ghosts to represent unknown ancestors in symbolic form. I draw patterns forming quilts and collapsing into lines and chaos. I want female figures to battle each other; I want these figures to fight the elements– dust, sandstorms, wind, and water. I want spirits to assist them, winged creatures by their side. I want to picture a struggle.(from A.I.R. Gallery website)
Ready to burn, 2014.
How ghosts sleep hive, 2014.
STATEMENT 2
After reading cultural critic Mark Dery’s essay “Black to the Future,” the type of work I create is a strain of Afrofuturism in that I re-imagine the history of the African Diaspora through the lens of science fiction, complex characters and spiritual realms. I’m invested in re-documenting the life and interpretation of African Americans through my own black and white vernacular that’s at once deeply personal and extremely invented. From juxtaposing historical images with family photos, to creating dark, alternative imaginative spaces and figures through my installations and Xerox drawings, my mark-making, patterns and aesthetic is in many ways otherworldly, an alternative universe. I write in my artist statement that the installations are “fear, anxiety and memory translated on flapping sheets. Ghosts congeal and bodies form in dark corners and hang about whispering until the inflection of their voices can be heard among the living.” (from Art 21 Magazine, October 2012)
We have never been modern, 2010.