pack li.gh.te (install view)

graphite wall drawing, shelving, glass jars, found and gathered natural materials, family artifacts, audio collage assemblage produced by the artist, blk bosom, and soupdreams in collaboration with Strange Fruit Femmes at the Nerman Museum for Contemporary Art

shown as apart of the charlotte st award fellows exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in overland park, kansas

2022

photos by EG Schempf

“References to generations of Black feminists sustain the matrilinear energies of Pack Li.gh.te: the installation pays homage to the many Black women whose words, ideas and attitudes have provided guidance to the artist. This pantheon includes family members, visual artist Alison Saar, characters from “classic” Black films such as Mother Sister in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and past and present Black feminist luminaries including Fanny Lou Hamer, Patricia Hill Collins and Lucille Clifton. But the installation is, foremost, an homage to Erykah Badu’s 2000 song “Bag Lady,” which furnishes the soundtrack’s background beat, the sustaining rhythms that carry sisterhood. glyneisha also grants personhood and personality to her depicted objects and spaces, acknowledging that agency is a more-than-human prerogative. Figures, objects and spaces are equals, vessels for memories that inhabit the present. Five graphite drawings on canvas—the earliest works in her installation—cast the artist’s memories of a breakup, full of tension and growing separation, onto her then-present living space. We carry our memories and nostalgia carries us, no matter where we are and how often we move. Memories cast long shadows, sparing nothing.

The more recent collages and assemblages are about letting go. They also celebrate Black traditions, rituals and spiritual practices of survival and healing transmitted by women in the home and extending to semi-public spaces like the stoop, the porch, the roof, the beauty shop, the botanica. Mirrors and windows abound in these works: portals and passages to unbounded elsewheres. Spaces of reflection and refraction, they are also sites of affirmation, self-invention and transcendence—the stages where the work of memory turns desiring and inventive to make space for ourselves in the story.”

(selection from (With)drawn: Thick and Thin as the Spaces Between by Sylvie Fortin)

(this project was supported by the Nerman Museum for Contemporary Art, Charlotte St Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts)