Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression
Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear.
As lockdown continues, and fear of the pandemic gives way to the rage of the political uprising, it’s become crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. In the words of critical theorist Jill Casid, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”
I’ve taken a clip from my project Hustlers & Empires, (2018) that features downtown New York legend and queer icon John Kelly singing a song he wrote for his character in Hustlers & Empires. Here, slowed to a halting breath amid a selection of found and original texts sourced during the pandemic, Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) speaks to the discomfort of self-reckoning, and the complicated relationship between social and political inertia.
