Nona Faustine “My Country”

Baxter Street/ the Camera Club of NY

This event has ended.

Baxter St at CCNY presents 2016 Workspace Resident Nona Faustine’s solo show My Country. Building on her celebrated White Shoes series here Faustine’s performative monument-making style again tracks history and the power wielded by its perpetuated falsehoods versus its barely recognizable truth, but also boldly asks us to confront the very idealogical DNA of America.

Since 2013 Faustine has gained national and international recognition for her photographic work that plays with historical narratives haunted by the black female body. She has used self-portraiture to re-mark locations in NYC where the history of slavery is literally buried physically and psychologically. The photographic documentation of her self-made monuments which avoid conventional readings of a cohesive national history work to expose the ongoing tragic legacy of slavery. These images, however, are not only about accountability, but also about our collective relationship to history. Increasingly she appears as a new heroic figure who is her sex, who is her race – and yet universal, who is more than the sum of her subjective parts.

Although her work continues to evoke a critical and emotional understanding of the past and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes she now adds depth to this discussion by including images of actual American monuments whose meaning today is literally riddled with obstacles. Organized as a dialogue between past and present with Faustine herself as the medium between the two, both in front of and behind the camera, this exhibit aims to make permanence feel fragile, impermanence palpable and to question everything in between.

The title of the show My Country purposely feels like a pause, an ellipse, a breath, meant to be followed by whatever the viewer chooses to think, whether it is “…tis of thee, sweet land of liberty…” or any possible descriptive sentence with that particular noun in place. However, for Faustine it is the possessive form, a declaration of ownership that informs the phrase, as if it were whispered almost inaudibly to oneself as a mantra, a sarcastic observation, or even a question. With the title she also asks us to consider what is buried beneath the words.

Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Brooklyn-based Nona Faustine received her MFA in 2013 from Bard College/ ICP where she studied photography. Her work has recently been seen in Institute of Fine Art, NYC, The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, NYC, The African American Museum of Philadelphia, Knockdown Center, Maspeth, NY, Governors Island, NY, Art Gallery at the College of Staten Island, NY, The Center For Arts & Culture At Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn, NY, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYC, The International Center of Photography Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, NY and is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem, NYC.