Installation with Sound and Photography
Exhibition Opening
Monday, December 4, 6-8 PM
Finissage
Saturday, December 9, 4-6 PM
Join Shaka Dendy for an intentional listening session and Q&A / talk at beginning around 4:30 PM.
What does it mean to be "Black"? At face value, it is the descriptor du jour for descendants of the African diaspora. However, since even before the Enlightenment, the term black has had social, political, religious, scientific, and philosophical implications reaching far beyond race. Our understanding of blackness today has been impacted by these preceding and concurring formulations, and is perhaps not something that can be directly observed, but, like black holes, can be seen through it's proximate effect. This is the approach of Black Meridian. Through sampling, appropriating, and assemblage, the sum total of this installation paradoxically narrows and expands the scope of black ontology through image, sound, and text.
Shaka Dendy is a conceptual artist, musician, and educator based in Boston. His artistic practice is a transdisciplinary pursuit of a native Black visual aesthetic with the rigor and complexities of jazz music and American minimalism. As a musician, his outfit Camp Blood was dubbed "the industrial hip-hop voice of the future" and released an eponymous EP to critical acclaim. Shaka Dendy works at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and as a freelance creative consultant. He issues a weekly newsletter, 12 Frames per Week, and holds a master's degree from Emerson College.
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