Of eaters and the eaten, 2023
Installation// Porcelain, glass, granulated white sugar grout, candied brown sugar, mahogany, carpet, and rugs// 28"x10'x16'. Photos taken by Christopher Wormald.
Of eaters and the eaten is both body and landscape, a display of an ontology. In a perpetual state of transient escape, morphing, melting, and mutating the broken porcelain tiles, oozing blue and white plates, slumped glass, cannibalized tchotchkes, and mutated moon jar vessels adorn the table. Kensugi parody keloids, acknowledging the violence and brokenness while offering coagulation as a product of healing. Candied brown sugar is poured on the table, leaking and pulling —disrupting the porcelain tableware –and acting as gestural Black beings reclaiming and occupying a space that has historically consumed them. The drip and ooze become an aesthetic of collapse and leakage. Melting is not only an act of decay but a mode of what Fred Moten terms Black fugitivity or “spirit of escape” –a freedom drive and death drive.