ARTIST STATEMENT

Willful Matters proposes an alternative scene of encounter for Black life forms*, through a theory of the abyss and dark matter that is remixed through the creation of textile—based weavings and sculptural drawings. Drawing on the ideas of Evelyn Hammonds—Black feminist scholar of the history of science, and Edouard Glissant—Caribbeanist scholar who writes extensively about post-colonial subjects, the show combines two bodies of work, Flag to the Abyss (2020-2023) and Symmetries/Asymmetries (2021-23).

I contend with the following questions and preoccupations: what can or do, materials do? How do materials and matter, matter? Can materials harness a willful opacity for Black life forms/Black femme configurations? My interest in the scholarship of Glissant and Hammonds is two-fold, I am interested in what might be made possible about Black life (Black femme life) through a collision with the inscrutable, and if in such resistance to transparency might other world building possibilities reveal themselves.

Flag to the Abyss (2020) is an inquiry into the premise what can materials do? How do materials, and matter, matter? What can opacity offer the marginalized? A flag denotes a clear location, while an abyss is an expansive chasm with no clear boundary. In Caribbeanist thinker Edouard Glissant’s hands, the abyss—an unreachable space at the bottom of the ocean— configures a right for the marginalized subject to be opaque, rather than legible, as a form of resistance. My interest in this engagement is how such a premise suggests the ways Black artists, Black cultural producers exceed categorization. These flags then bring together a variety of materials, cotton, plastic, netting, fiberglass screen and thread, in an attempt to hold the tension of definable/legible and opaque. Additionally, the materials have utilitarian functions that when put together are transformed.

The series Symmetries/Asymmetries (2020-Present) uses photography and sculptural works-on-paper to reflect on light and shadow, line and form. Using these more formal characteristics of art making, through collaged components that attempt to toe-the-line between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships between elements. The photographs in the series capture symmetries through overlapping imagery in a two-dimensional plane. I see the works-on-paper, similarly playing with relational space and place, transition and ambiguity, through abstraction. Ultimately, the workson-paper and photographs that make up Symmetries/Asymmetries considers the process of orienting bodies, lines, and objects; oriented through liminality, and in excess.

Biography

SARAH STEFANA SMITH (b. 1982, Brooklyn, New York, raised Columbia, Maryland) aesthetically and critically contributes to discourses on black culture, queer theory, affect studies, and visual and aesthetic representation. Smith’s work has been exhibited or shown at the Arlington Art Center, VA; DC Art Center, Washington, D.C.; Borland Project Space, Penn State, PA; Gallery CA, Baltimore, MD; and the twenty-year retrospective of A Different Eye: Sistagraphy Celebrates 20 Years of Photography, an Atlanta-based photography collective of African American women. They have published in The Black Scholar Journal, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing.

Smith has participated in numerous residences including Creativities Project, University of Pittsburgh, PA; Merriweather District AIR, Columbia, MD; 77Arts, Rutland, VT; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, and the Vermont Studio Center. They received their PhD in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada; an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Goddard College, VT; and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, GA. Currently, Smith is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, MA, lecturing on gender and visual culture, transnational feminism, and Black art and culture.