A Recollection Of Dreams

Amina Ross, dana washington-queen

Curated by Zion Douglass

At Springsteen, Baltimore

May 08 — June 12, 2021

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”
 

— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

 

Springsteen Gallery and guest curator Zion Douglass are excited to present a recollection of dreams, an experimental exhibition that stages a conversation between artists Amina Ross and dana washington-queen. The exhibition explores dreaming as a sensory experience that can articulate freedom sourced from the ancestral and autobiographical. Through the use of sculpture, video installation, and sound, the artists construct speculative worlds that are rooted in Black queer modalities of healing.

 

Amina Ross’ sculptural experience Etheric Bridge (Spring’s Sutures) merges a 4-channel video with machine made and natural materials. Composed of steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, and reclaimed cedar wood from New City water tanks, this newly commissioned work conjures an architecture that extends the artist’s physical and material interest in collaboration. Together with Jared Brown and an ephemeral group of hand embroiderers — Samantha Kerr, Savannah Wood, Sienna Kwami, Savannah Imani Wade — Ross’ practice invites us to seek beauty in the undoing of anti-Black capitalist labor systems.

 

dana washington-queen’s two-channel video installation, Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered, is the first presentation of an in-progress hybrid documentary that excavates personal historiography and colonial fragmentation. The three-part film journeys from a speculative origin story through the ancestral and into the present, providing a nuanced constellation of Black life that uses sensory elements to exceed the limits of representation as a visual strategy. The film introduces “Black Noetic Theory” (BNt), an audiovisual method in development by washington-queen. BNt “seeks to push against the bounds of genre and production strategies, collapsing distinctions between documentary, cinema, video, and performance, echoing the incoherencies of Black life, history, and memory.”[1]
 

Amina Ross and dana washington-queen pivot between spiritual, digital and physical realms; between the embodied and the emotional; jostling us towards habitable dreamscapes where fragmentation evolves into a holistic process of knowing, feeling, and breathing into liberatory possibilities.

[1] dana washington-queen, “Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered” UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020, p.13

Amina Ross Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures, 2021 Steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, reclaimed cedar wood from NYC water tanks, reclaimed mdf, 4 monitors, media players, soil, salvaged grass from Yale law school’s central courtyard 84 x 42 x 72 in. Sculpture is accompanied by audio track: Amina Ross, Metal Crossroad Composition, 2021 Scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross) Sound
Amina Ross Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures, 2021 Steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, reclaimed cedar wood from NYC water tanks, reclaimed mdf, 4 monitors, media players, soil, salvaged grass from Yale law school’s central courtyard 84 x 42 x 72 in. Sculpture is accompanied by audio track: Amina Ross, Metal Crossroad Composition, 2021 Scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross) Sound
Amina Ross Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures, 2021 Steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, reclaimed cedar wood from NYC water tanks, reclaimed mdf, 4 monitors, media players, soil, salvaged grass from Yale law school’s central courtyard 84 x 42 x 72 in. Sculpture is accompanied by audio track: Amina Ross, Metal Crossroad Composition, 2021 Scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross) Sound
Amina Ross Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures, 2021 Steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, reclaimed cedar wood from NYC water tanks, reclaimed mdf, 4 monitors, media players, soil, salvaged grass from Yale law school’s central courtyard 84 x 42 x 72 in. Sculpture is accompanied by audio track: Amina Ross, Metal Crossroad Composition, 2021 Scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross) Sound
Amina Ross Spring’s sutures, 2021 4 channel video, run time: 8:00 4 channel video work is a part of the larger sculpture, Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures. It can be viewed by reclining on the sculpture.
Amina Ross Spring’s sutures, 2021 4 channel video, run time: 8:00 4 channel video work is a part of the larger sculpture, Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures. It can be viewed by reclining on the sculpture.
Amina Ross Spring’s sutures, 2021 4 channel video, run time: 8:00 4 channel video work is a part of the larger sculpture, Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures. It can be viewed by reclining on the sculpture.
Amina Ross Spring’s sutures, 2021 4 channel video, run time: 8:00 4 channel video work is a part of the larger sculpture, Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures. It can be viewed by reclining on the sculpture.
Amina Ross Spring’s sutures, 2021 4 channel video, run time: 8:00 4 channel video work is a part of the larger sculpture, Etheric Bridge: spring’s sutures. It can be viewed by reclining on the sculpture.
Amina Ross Vision of Beauty UNISEX, 2021 Two MDF panels, polyfill batting, digital print and screen print on poly satin blend 40 x 80 in.
Amina Ross Vision of Beauty UNISEX, 2021 Two MDF panels, polyfill batting, digital print and screen print on poly satin blend 40 x 80 in.
Amina Ross Fountain Body I (Catharsis), 2019 3D animation and window variable dimensions
Amina Ross Robin. S Mantra Acapelle, 2021 Sound scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross)
Amina Ross Robin. S Mantra Acapelle, 2021 Sound scored by Jared Brown (featuring vocals from Amina Ross)
dana washington-queen Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered, 2020 2 channel video, stereo, color Run time 44:10

Springsteen

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