LADI'SASHA JONES: A Grammar for Black Interior Art

All images and artwork belong to Evan iIekoya

Black Interior Art

[ Black – always with a capital “B”]

[Interior – the inner, internal]

[Art – manifestations of Black cultural production]

              

The Interior

• a. The interior is the inner life and imaginary; an inwardness; deep thought, affect, and resonance. It is of its own making and conditioning. Interiority is open and willful, transformative and unfolding. Self-reflexive. Holding an intimacy and capacity for self-possession, self-awareness, and self-fullness; like when Gil Scott Heron recites, “I did not become someone different/ That I did not want to be.” 
• b. The interior is not neutral or universal; representative or inclusive. It is not of resistance or corrective practices; neither an alternative state nor one of retreat.
• c. Blackness is not an implied or privileged idiom within the interior. In the context of this text, Black interiority speaks to the inner aliveness of a people and the expressive cultural production they shape.
• d. The interior is sovereign, autonomous, and, as described by Kevin Quashie, quiet and apart from the scope of public life. “The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.”
• e. Although the interior is not for public consumption, it is not withholding either. We must consider ascension and the underground as they relate to Black interior life and design. Interiority is not of the underground but advances the underground as a strategy of radical self-making and placekeeping. A way of seeing in the darkness and through the blues; the blue of Black. The underground as interior sight, grip, and creation in the blue of Black. The deep space of multiplicity, plurality, possibility, and hope; a modality of experimentation.

Interior Time

• f. The interior is of real time. Black aliveness in real time; the inner making and expressiveness of being; to be real (come alive) in time. Black interior time is in the (process of) becoming; it can be constant, durational, or entered into.
• g. Interior time is of a circular futurity, cultural (re)production in the round. The Black interior is in overtime and takes place over time. Holding the terror of the never-ending measure of violence, alongside the ever-expanding measures of survival, spirituality, and pleasure.
• h. Worldmaking is a conditional practice of the Black interior. The speculative labor of worlding and unworlding is shaped from what is deeply seen, unseen, and made to appear. Not of fixed truth, realness, or evidence, but of the relentless necessity to conjure and imagine the unthinkable, the unknown (new reaches of both the interior and exterior realms). Worldmaking is a critical practice of assemblage; stretching the value bounds of the known world. It is a polemic against what Saidiya Hartman deems the precarity of Black life. 

This conceptual frame of worlding takes shape in artist Sondra Perry’s immersive avatars, gaming simulations, and workstation installations. Perry makes correlations between color technologies and Black spatiality as expressed in her explorations of chroma key blue post-production and hyper-modulated renderings of her skin which achieve new effects around Black internet imaging. Her works, Wet and Wavy—Typhoon coming on for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016) and Typhoon Coming On (2018) envelop viewers in the animated looping of purple waves or currents that are depictions of the 1840 J. M. W. Turner painting of the Zong massacre. The residual timing of the loop and the ultra-bright purpling of the water are magnetizing, keeping the viewer in the pulse of the waves.

These works are in conversation with what Christina Sharpe defines as residence time and the wake. “This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in the Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time.”4 Worldmaking occurs in residence time. We are held in (or return to) the conscious presence of the ship, the overboard, and the Atlantic. Perry is creating in the surreal glow of this holding....