Article reflecting on over ten years of conducting and collecting interviews with and by women artists of African descent in a variety of formats (e.g. narrative arts writing, academic research and documentary film/video) to note the specific ways that artists’ interviews help to rewrite art-historical narratives.

Through painting, I use materiality to describe the material world. By rooting my practice in visual culture and art history, I seek to extend the meaning of images beyond their initial form. The coalescing of opposing and complimentary formal elements accentuate the visual and contextual friction. This allows the work to exist in an ambiguous state. Seen together, my works appear disparate, but they suggest alternative meanings through association with one another. The works can exist on their own, but engage in dialogue when juxtaposed against each other. Although about specific occurrences, the works afford the viewer their own interpretations.

Memory Beast was a series of experiments in multispecies collaborative storytelling. A new tool was created, a memory beast, a holotype representing our ideas of specific species, based on memories and drawings collected in participatory research. The fabricated memory beasts, placed next to their biological counterparts, made visible the conflation of living species with personal memory and cultural imagery. Using this new tool, implanted with sonic recordings of cows, the beginnings of an interspecies pidgin language was developed. Memory Beast imagined and enacted new pathways to finite flourishing on a wounded earth, planting story seeds for alternative realities.

Each of my oil or pastel paintings is an observation of seemingly mundane familiar places that I encounter day-to-day. I think of my art as a kind of visual journalism, where I examine common human emotions evoked by a careful consideration of the substance of light interacting with spaces or objects. The naturalistically rendered compositions are cropped and depicted in small fragments, allowing the viewer a brief glimpse into a quiet portrayal of the world. Essentially, my art allows me to share my sensibilities and to connect with others through portraits of ordinary, yet intimate, moments in time.

Work of art in spider wood, aquarium plants, 3d prints by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Work of art in vinyl, aquarium light, brackets by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Work of art in spider wood, aquarium plants, 3d prints by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".

Work of art in vinyl, aquarium light, brackets by artist Russell Anderson as part of his 2021 exhibition, entitled "Modified Aesthetics on an Inner Space".