marisse cato - Art of the Black World

“Sounding the Moment"   Four Standing Musicians   1965 Romare Bearden, Watercolour     Sounding the Moment would be built around Romare Bearden’s 1965  Four Standing Musicians  and would function to centre sonic parallels to “sound” each of the works. Frequently in Black contemporary art, there are allusions to music being performed, practiced, heard, enjoyed in private or public, in relation to specific sounding traditions. I am currently working to have one of my own multichannel sound installations exhibited at Christie’s in London in dialogue with contemporary visual artists (painting, photography, textiles etc). Curating an installation with sounding aspects of each visual art work that works individually as well as concurrently in polyphony with eachother is a type of larger audio-visual exhibition I would seek to construct. I would aim to highlight both the range as well as lineages of aesthetic properties that converge and diverge across differ...

  Skunder Bohossain  Nightflight of Dread and Delight   1964  Oil on Canvas with collage  5x5 ½ ft   Bohossain’s  Nightflight , also referred to sometimes as  Juju’s flight of Delight and Terror  immediately captured me. I think it is the blurring of edges, the multiplicity of forms in the aesthetics, and the necessity to figure out different layers of structures formed from this superimpositions that appealed to me. Presented in  The Short Century  exhibition, this                                                                                                                                       ...

 The metaphor of chromatic blackness with African-American perspective is one I find deeply compelling both aesthetically as well as a sense through which to read work. It reads to me in some ways an emphasis of the way that darker pigmented eyes let in less light/are less light sensitive than lighter coloured eyes and therefore a way to culturally and subjectively situate an African-American perspective in these contexts. For this post I would like to expand upon my discussion of Roy DeCarava's Graduation, 1949. The clear binary of light concentrated in perhaps a third of the image where the subject is positioned whilst the rest of the image is mainly darker hues of grey and black is poignant from many perspectives with regard to reading American culture. The first being the subject bathed in light in her Graduation gown, whereby this tradition of a white graduation gown is aligned with EuroAmerican whiteness in many ways. White often associated with purity and wisdom and new begi...