The CAC is excited to present SOLOS: Exhibitions and New Work Showcases by CAC Visual Artists-in-Residence. The CAC's Artist Residency program supports New Orleans performing and visual artists with studio time, exhibition and performance opportunities, alongside technical and curatorial support the creation of new, interdisciplinary work.
In the Fall of 2020, visual artists Ana Hernandez, Shana M. griffin, and Sarah Hill were selected into the CAC Artist in Residence program and were provided with 1,000 square feet of built-out studio space in the CAC’s second floor Lupin Gallery. This exhibition is the first look at their new work, and will be on view January 9, 2021 through April 25, 2021.
Meet the Artists and Their Work
DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability by Shana M. griffin
Artist Statement: DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability builds on the current research of the DISPLACED project, with a series of work created during the residency exploring geographies of black displacement, dislocation, containment, and disposability in land-use planning, housing policies, and urban development, starting with racial slavery and the violent formation of New Orleans as a colonial enterprise and carceral landscape. The work engages historical research and policies of divestment, residential segregation, slum clearance, urban renewal, housing discrimination, and tenant laws. Using archival research, historical images, maps, ephemera, founded objects, original artwork, person narratives, and stories of resistance, DISPLACING Blackness chronicles the afterlife of slavery through the institutionalization of racial and gender violence in spatial segregation and discriminatory policies designed to make black people disappear. From abstract work depicting the violent screams of bondage and dispossession to the recreation of a federal housing office where policymakers created urban investment and mortgage underwriting policies to personal narratives of displacement and refusal, DISPLACING Blackness examines the multiple ways displacement takes place and shape in black life and become sites of everyday violence and subjectivity.
About the Artist: Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, independent researcher, applied sociologist, artist, and geographer. Her practice is interdisciplinary and undisciplinary, working across the fields of sociology, geography, public art, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, and gender-based violence. She engages in research, organizing projects, and art practices that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora—centering the particular experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination. She’s the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of black feminist thought; and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia and public history project that chronicle the institutionalization of spatial residential segregation through the violence of racial slavery and displacement in New Orleans. Shana currently serves as Interim Executive Director of Antenna, a multidisciplinary arts organization. Learn more shanamgriffin.com
MATTER out of time by Ana Hernandez
Artist Statement: Reflections on a re-centering of and return to Ways of Knowing.
About the Artist: Ana Hernandez is a Painter, Printmaker, and Sculptor currently living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a founding member of Level Artist Collective and has been nominated for and awarded Artist Residencies by Joan Mitchell Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New Orleans, with venues including The New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, The Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, A Studio in the Woods, Newcomb Art Museum, Xavier University, and Stella Jones Gallery. She has also shown nationally in Philadelphia, PN; Durham, NC; Wichita, KS; Richmond, VA; New York City, NY; and Chicago, IL.
To the Farmhouse by Sarah Hill
Artist Statement: To the Farmhouse is a reclamation story that navigates the hostile relationship between my ordained mother portrayed as an owl and my transness. To the Farmhouse is an eleven minute stop-motion animation that is accompanied by a series of large scale sculptures and objects constructed for animation at the CAC. The 8ft by 3ft church becomes the backdrop for the animation which is projected onto the floor of the church. The narrative-based audio focuses on internal introspection through short autobiographical vignettes. In To the Farmhouse, time is suspended, sped up, reversed and slowed down through stop motion techniques. Objects, like the church and owl, decay and reappear. Similar to the way Virginia Woolf’s, To the Lighthouse, and K-Ming Chang's Bestiary, portray time in a queer way, time claws and scratches, floats in and out of reality and ultimately builds a new foundation through reclamation. By placing the emphasis on my thoughts and feelings instead of my mothers, To the Farmhouse seeks to disrupt heteronormative timelines of familial patterns.
About the Artist: Sarah Hill (They/Them) lives and works in New Orleans. They have participated in-group shows at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, McNay Art, Museum, San Antonio, TX, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA and The CAC, New Orleans. They have screened films in Australia, Berlin, Canada, Copenhagen, London, Miami, New York, Italy, North Carolina, UK, San Francisco and Scotland. Sarah has performed at Crystal Bridges Museum, Le Lieu, Canada, Performance Platform, Poland, Mobius, in Boston, Grace Space in New York, São Paulo-Santos, Brazil and, Luxembourg.