South Arts 2022 Southern Prize and State Fellows

The camera functions as a tool that crops. It flattens space, freezes time, silences sound. Photography cuts out all that makes the world around us alive - then, is the photograph a kind of death? And if the photograph is death - what does it mean to regenerate an image or to wear it as a costume? The photograph is a stand-in; both presence and absence, simultaneously. My current work approaches photography from this framework in order to explore my relationship to historical identity and cultural inheritance in the American south.

My practice begins with my family's stories, flickering on the theater screen of my mind. My first act of making is a performance for the camera, a way of fixing the mental images conjured by stories; rendering them visible and suspended on the surface of the film. My work attempts to “reverse the camera's crop” by returning space, time, and animation to the latent image of memory. By incorporating forms of installation, lens-based media, performance, and storytelling, my work overlaps the past with the present and collapses the fourth wall established in the still image.

The ineffable nature of this lived narrative is neither didactic nor linear. Instead, it is so many threads and my weaving hands tying them together: the photograph as time, frozen – the camera, a device capable of shapeshifting memory – and the story – an apparition moving across time and space, resisting stillness and singularity.

- South Arts

GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Miami/Berlin-based artist. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Her work desires to connect private and public space through interventionist, participatory art with an emphasis on collaboration and collectivity. She builds installations that are designed for non-directive play in order to express the potential of our embodied cognition. She references architecture and design by reflecting on how the voids in the spaces we inhabit affect our everyday. Through her work she addresses the shifting notions of gender and identity, intimacy and proximity, and forms of communication and miscommunication in today’s technological and consumer culture. Her most recent work performs these possibilities by collaborating with movement and sound based artists. These improvisations are political acts, analyzing and critiquing what it means to share public space as womxn, queer folks and people of color.

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It is exhausting to exist as a multi-racial man in America. In 1978, my West Indian mother illegally entered the United States by way of New York. She relinquished her Caribbean heritage and adopted a pseudonym. She met my African-American father at a funeral, fell in love and relocated to North Carolina. She slowed her speech and was taught how to cook soul food. I had an older brother. He was the only person on earth that looked like me. In 2018 he was shot and killed by a Georgia State Patrol officer.

This body of work explores the constructs of self-identity. I study assimilation as a means of survival and view cultural appropriation as a tactic used to preserve whiteness. I look to the omnipresent pop culture that concurrently borrows and dismisses ideas and identities. The work confronts societal, racial and cultural disparities by employing literal forms of appropriation. The reexamination of the term “white” is an example of this. As well as the implementation of fairer skin tones on surfaces of the art work.

Through self-reflection and humor I examine the fallacies present in the national politics of social identity. I admittedly face my own deficiencies while aimlessly denying responsibility. As a result, the work is both self aware and irreverent. While quietly clamoring for justice for the deceased, the work attempts to deescalate the highly accepted parable of our “White savior”.

Our paradoxical existence brings to light the lack of aura that is represented by the visceral sitcom called humanity.

- South Arts

If the nature of architecture is fixed and permanent then the opposite would be a textile, collapsible and movable. Further consideration would show more common links than differences. Both mediums define space, create shelter and allow privacy; a textile however, has the advantage of flexibility. It is a semi two-dimensional plane that has the ability to fold, drape, move and change to its surroundings.

My work uses cloth construction as a fundamental center, a place to start from and move back to. With a background in weaving, I see myself as a builder; drawing clear connections between the lines of thread laid perpendicularly through a warp and the construction of architectural spaces.

​Formally, my work takes shape through a pallet of building materials either paired with or mimicking textiles. I found a tension between materials like concrete and the structural patterns of cloth. By pairing these seemingly opposite worlds together I invert material stereotypes, using the ‘delicate’ material to exhibit strength or exposing the ‘structural’ materials’ instabilities. These gestures allow for a reinterpretation of material identities leaving the viewer to confront their understanding of these everyday utilities.

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My artwork explores what it means to live in an era of global warming with an uncertain future, and specifically what that means in Southern Louisiana. My practice explores the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future.

I make work that connects fossil fuel extraction and plastic production to their roots in the white supremacy and capitalism that have fueled the exploitation of people and the landscape from the times of colonization and enslavement. My works draw viewers into an experience that bridges past and present with visions of the future ecosystems that might emerge from our culture’s detritus if we fail to change course. Believing that art has the power to make people feel deeply and to question their perspectives, I use my artwork to reach and engage people on the issue of climate change in an increasingly oversaturated information age.

In art pieces ranging from works on paper to large-scale installations, I bring together unlikely materials in combinations that are often beautiful; they draw viewers in to stay with the work that, on closer inspection, has a deeper burn that implicates them in our collective new realities—challenging them to think critically about their place in this greater network as we co-evolve together. My work creates space to imagine what else could be possible now and beyond; it inspires viewers to think about what individual and collective changes are needed for a just transition to a livable future.

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The preservation of heritage and cultural pride through visual art. The style used in my drawings is primitive Impressionism. The media are crayon, pencils, markers and pens on art paper. All of my paintings are done on 3 sections of the paper with each section intersecting the section above it in order to produce a 3 dimensional affect. The color of the faces in my paintings are done with mahogany. This color was used to show the glow of the sun on people faces as seen by my inner child. My work depicts people, places, and things from the Civil War, Depression, and the Desegregation Eras as passed down through folklore, written and oral history, photographs my own experience. My career as an educator for 20 plus years was brought to a sudden halt after several accidents. So, I turned to art which I loved as a child. During my recovery period, I started a collection of paintings called the Reflection and Road Side Series. Because of the development of Reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome (RSD) from a head injury, I have severe muscle problems. So you will see several time-intensive paintings that were done before 2019. My ancestors used pigments from plants as their media and wood, cloth, and brown paper as their canvases. I use crayon, markers, pens and pencils as media and art paper as canvases trying to produce the same natural colors in my art.

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Referencing from early images of Native American boarding schools across North America, I make paintings that explore cultural assimilation to reconstruct a historical narrative. As one part of a long history of removing, conforming or killing indigenous people in the U.S., these boarding schools were meant to assimilate Native American children into white society through means of oppression and annihilation of their culture. I research these stories through found archival photographs from the Library of Congress and other Internet sources, reinterpreted in paintings of loose, direct layers of brushwork. The method of documentation used to create the visual record of cultural removal is reframed in the paintings. My work ranges from small to large scale to make a montage of acrylic paintings that radiate the spirit of the individual subjects. I'm interested in making the work in a fast, provisional, manner that explores the complexity of the boarding school stories, reflecting memory and its impact on the present.

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My art does not fit neatly into a box to be packaged, labeled, and mass-produced; it is something to be experienced and contemplated.

I examine contemporary society through a lens of psycho-analysis by deconstructing everyday objects, actions, and experiences. This work often emerges on-site, composed of found items, mined from the surrounding area. I arrive equipped with only a color and the edge of an idea to learn from each place, situated in time, among its history and present day. The result invites viewers to enter the artwork as if stepping into a painting. This reality is separate from ordinary life and traditional art-viewing.

Domestic imagery (home) serves as a metaphor for the mind, highlighting the social psyche as it relates place to the formation of identity. Emotional tendencies such as insecurity, dependence, and compulsion are present, as comforts of ordinary life, such as the couch or chair are personified. Object placement is crucial to my process, as this action exerts a need for control much like posturing the self in public space. Color is used to heighten mental awareness by evoking an emotional response. Feelings of nostalgia, flashes of past trauma, or a dreamlike state of déjà vu may occur. These installations are temporary; thus, placing attention on the present moment while confronting consumer culture. I implore viewer investigation and imagination to draw one's own conclusions.

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Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo’s sculptural work utilizes the possibilities within hybridity to speak of a hypothetical place where humans have evolved into hybrid beings with animals, insects, and discarded human-made materials. The resulting physical evolution of this voluntary merging challenges social discomfort around bodies that are not easily categorized by blurring the boundaries between animal and human, living and dead, animate and inanimate. She uses Latin-American history, abject theory, and environmental distress to investigate notions of human exceptionalism, as well as humanity’s trajectory. Drawing upon her own experiences, her work investigates identities that straddle cultures and utilizes that hybrid state as an opportunity for reckoning. The resulting sculptural narrative aims to disrupt notions of human hierarchy, testing the phenomenon between humanity, mammality and technology in a chimeric future.

- South Arts