Shawanda Corbett Exhibition
Salon 94 (3 E 89th St.)
This event has ended.
Shawanda Corbett works across ceramics, film, performance, and dance often collaborating with her choreographer (and brother) Albert Corbett. Her varied artistic practice attends to the relationship between these mediums. Her ceramic objects, for example, speak deeply to an imagination and intuition enlivened by performance. Moreover, as Corbett’s vessels can be described as either ceramics, cyborg sculptures, performative objects and so on, one’s inability to define them as one or the other speaks to their resistance to fixed categorizations and their alignment with hybridity.
Ahead of her first solo exhibition in the United States at Salon 94 tilted To the Fields of Lilac, Corbett continues her exploration into a ceramic practice rooted in the personal whilst extending to a range of references from cross-cultural and geographic pottery traditions in West Africa, Asia, and back to ancient civilizations. Black feminist writer Toni Morrison’s book Beloved (1987) was a source of inspiration as the author framed racism as a form of “cultural haunting”. “I named the show To the Fields of Lilac to signal a continuation or a further narrative that thinks about what happens beyond ‘Wade in the Water’, the spiritual originally sung by slaves on their quest for freedom and thinking about how water became a signifier for protection for the enslaved on their road to freedom,” she said recently. “But what does it mean to actually be free? Are we really absolutely free in a capitalist, neoliberal society we find ourselves in today?”
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Schedule
from January 19, 2022 to March 05, 2022
Opening Reception on 2022-01-19 from 18:00 to 20:00