Artist: Sondra Perry
Exhibition title: netherrrrrr
Venue: Good Weather, North Little Rock, US
Date: April 9 – May 8, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Good Weather
What is nothingness? What is thingliness? What is blackness? What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of…a life in common?
Do you remember where we are? No way where we are is here. Where we were, where we are, is what we meant by mu…the void of our subjectivity.
In the hold, blackness and imagination, in and as consent not to be a single being, are (more and less than) one.
The night holds fantasy, not identity.
–Fred Moten (2013)
You can’t see it. And yet it’s right here/there. The netherrrrrr. And so it is in the netherrrr and to recognize the netherrrrrrrrr, to socially disrupt the netherrr, Sondra Perry has dismantled the finite and covered it in the expansiveness of nothingness (the “void of our subjectivity”). A chroma key blue, a deep digital space, an elusive space, a virtual space that is an understudy for blackness. A space which is radical. A space interrogating black invisibility in American society through abstraction and potentiality. A space rattling a foundational condition: the maintaining/protection of that which we call white supremacy—a power relationship which has an oppressive spine. And the netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr pressed towards contradiction in this codified space, finds passage as the natural state, fugitivity and imagination in the nothingness. This strategic shiftiness dodges commodification, avoiding labels, categories, and naming. No measure. No pyramids. No silos. No spectrums. No binaries. Nothing. Only a recognition of positionality and in presenting this work, a generosity and shared vulnerability, that may transubstantiate into a shared revolution.
