Self Maintenance Resource Center (Exhibition)
Self Maintenance Resource Center (Exhibition)
June 19th -
July 24th, 2021
Self Maintenance Resource Center is a curatorial collaboration between Katherine Simóne Reynolds and Anaïs Duplan, Founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies.
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 19th from 3 to 8 pm
Through the process of wheatpasting, Self Maintenance Resource Center layers the participants’ research in the form of PDFs and Xerox copies, alongside an assembly of scores, sound works, and reference videos before concluding on July 24, 2021.
The Luminary is pleased to present the next iteration of Self Maintenance Resource Center, a curatorial collaboration between Katherine Simóne Reynolds and Anaïs Duplan, Founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. Developed from the 2020 online project of the same name, this exhibition presents the resources, references, and research of five, invited artists: Naima Green, Tabita Rezaire, Sun Cha, Evan Ifekoya, and Marquis Bey. Each week, The Luminary will reveal a new episode of an artist and their contributions to the gallery space. Opening on June 19, 2021, the exhibition takes an additive approach with the newest contributions building on previous resources.
“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love” - Elizabeth Alexander The Light of the World
For Alexander, desire and love are comfortably housed within grief and loss. This is a time of seeing and feeling immense loss while navigating a labyrinth of social desolation daily. But through the assumed “contactless,” we are coming to terms with our surface understanding of the complexities of deep intimacy. Stemming from a queer Black politic, assessing the relationship between artistic production and the complexities of desire, love, and self-maintenance requires a critical approach through documentation to trace their mutual influence. Documentation functions as both a process and a product.
Self Maintenance Resource Center documents the process and discovery of QTPOC artistic approaches to love, intimacy and desire within a living exhibition. What does it mean to beautifully suffer loudly together? To refuse the whitewashing of romance, care, and the perception of what it means to nurture. Touch was never our problem, a moralistic tight hold on our wrist was. Will our understanding of proximity be forever marked as one of irresponsibility?
Can you come closer to me?
How can I get closer to you?
We are inviting you to think of your relationship to intimacy topographically, biologically relating to or representing the physical distribution of parts or features on the surface of or within an organ or organism. This project generates points of departure through which we address the question of what are the innards of the QTPOC relationship to desire, romance, a “love ethic”?
This exhibition extends from the online project produced by The Luminary’s Katherine Simóne Reynolds and Kalaija Mallery in the summer of 2020. This first version of the Self Maintenance Resource Center offered a digital space of anti-algorithmic sharing of links, PDFs, and screenshots entangled together by friends expanding on the concept of the claustrophobic “art world.” For the newest iteration of Self Maintenance, in addition to activating research and documentation via a living exhibition, Reynolds and Duplan will offer a microsite to engage with the evolution of discovery. This microsite will be made public at the close of the physical exhibition on July 24, 2021. The culmination of the project via the microsite illuminates the ongoing construction of identity, self-maintenance, love, and intimacy.
The interest is in the process and discovery not in completion.
About The Center for Afrofuturist Studies
The Center for Afrofuturist Studies is an artist residency program that reimagines the futures of marginalized people by creating dynamic workspaces for artists of color. Dynamic means interactive, supportive, community-engaged, rigorous, and inclusive. The CAS wants to rethink and challenge what an arts practice that revolves around Black futurity looks like. We believe that's only possible when arts organizations commit to fully supporting the work being done by Black artists. For more information, please visit: http://afrofuturist.center