THRESHOLD: RECONTEXTUALIZING SELF-PORTRAITURE
January 26 - May 27, 2023
Featuring photographs by:
Brittney Cathey-Adams | Eva Birhanu
Jillian Marie Browning | Adama Delphine Fawundu
André TERREL JACKSON | Tommy Kha | Lorena Molina
AZYA LASHELLE | Lorenzo Triburgo
Sarah Van Dyck | JON WES
Curated by Jillian Marie Browning,
Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
INTRODUCTION
“Threshold”
:A point of departure or transition
:A point of entry, a barrier that must be crossed
Artists from marginalized communities are often drawn to self-portraiture in order to insert themselves into institutions where they have historically been excluded. Each of the 10 artists chosen in this exhibition use the medium of self-portraiture to take back the narrative of their own stories. Exploring themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the body, this exhibition serves as a platform for artists to speak about their embodied experiences on their own terms.
Adam Delphine Fawndu, the cleanse, 2019, video still. On Loan Courtesy of the Artist.
As an artist, my working method has always included making work about myself and my body because I did not see myself on museum walls or in textbooks; I was not taught about artists who look like me in school. Like many artists from marginalized backgrounds, I had to relate to and form connections with art that wasn’t created for me – to work that was never designed with folks like me in mind as the audience.
Each of the artists in this exhibition have taken control of their image and how they are seen, as both conceptual expression and representative practice. Creating art within an environment where you never see yourself represented in the mainstream is risky. These artists are courageous and unapologetic. These works are necessary.
Make the thing you want to see in the world.
Jillian Marie Browning
EXHIbition Dates and Programming
Threshold: Recontextualizing Self-Portraiture will be on display from January 27 - May 27, 2023. An opening reception, including presentations by some of the featured artists, was held on January 26th at 6pm, alongside the official opening of the upper gallery.
A virtual roundtable panel featuring Jillian Marie Browning, Jon Wes, Azya Lashelle, Brittney Cathey-Adams, eva birhanu, Lorena Molina, Lorenzo Triburgo, and Sarah Van Dyck was held on March 24th, 2023. This event was recorded and can be watched in its entirety below.
Threshold: Recontextualizing Self-Portraiture
Virtual Roundtable Discussion
Meet The Artists
Brittney Cathey-Addams
Brittney Cathy-Adams, Ablaze, 2022. On loan courtesy of the artist.
As a fat-bodied person, I am told that I must operate under shame and shrink myself as much as possible. When I stood in front of my lens nude for the first time, it created a radical change in self-perception. I realized that for two decades I had apologized for my body. As my work began to develop, I photographed with one question in mind, “What does being in this body feel like?” I began to answer by taking up space, and making a body commonly seen as undesirable project power through vulnerability. It is essential to consider not just who is allowed to be photographed but how. Images play a pivotal role in forming our belief system and engrain biases awaiting confrontation. The first place I could start was by drawing a line of fear out in front of myself and ever so slowly, over the last ten years of my work, step over each one. The images serve as an open ended and complicated relationship built on the notion that there is no way to grow into someone I can love through hate.
Brittney Cathey-Adams is a photographic artist currently located in Portland, OR. Her work includes themes of body politics, and fat representation that interrogates the histories of the male gaze and self-portraiture. Her work has been on exhibit throughout institutions such as the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA, Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA and Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, CO. She was part of the 2019 Curatorial Prize at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR and gave a lecture at the Portland Art Museum. More recently, she was an emerging artist for SF Camerawork’s FORECAST 2020. With a strong passion for photography and art education, Cathey-Adams dedicates herself to image making as well as sharing visual language through teaching at Portland Community College and Clackamas Community College.
Eva Birhanu
Eva Birhanu, wear my hair, 2019, Jacquard woven tapestry. On loan courtesy of the artist.
In a non-traditional self portrait, threads of glistening golden noodles and a sharp stare are draped across a handwoven textile. wear my hair (2019) is a Jacquard woven self-portrait that reflects and challenges the Gaze, more specifically the oppressors Gaze. Contemplating the labour and emotional response to features specific to mixed and Black women, the noodles draped over naturally curly hair respond to acts of overstepping boundaries from outsiders.The piercing Gaze both intimidates and intrigues viewers to question these acts of microaggression, while upturning the traditional portrait into a highly tactile, desirable medium.
eva birhanu is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator working in Mohkinstis (Calgary, Alberta) Treaty 7 Territory. Born in Canada to immigrant parents from Denmark and Ethiopia, she focuses on identity and biraciality in her work. eva works in mediums of fibre and sculpture, auto-ethnographically exploring exoticism, objectification, ally performativity, and tradition. In her practice, eva often incorporates iconography of her own racial identity as a way to portray micro aggressions felt by biracial and Black women. eva graduated with distinction from Alberta University of the Arts with a BFA in Fibre. She is currently the Curatorial Resident at Stride Gallery, exploring her emerging curatorial practice.
Jillian Marie Browning
Jillian Marie Browning, Say It Back, 2022, Cyanotype on cotton. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Through the use of historic photographic processes and other multi-disciplinary technique I explore the concept of feminine identity through the lens of the contemporary black experience. Utilizing self portraiture, my work often deals with the intersection of feminism and race, and how the two are constructed through the investigation of social, familial, and gender roles. Additionally, my work considers the way in which personal identity is assembled through one’s body image and racial identity.
Jillian Marie Browning (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing themes of feminism, identity, and the contemporary black experience. Born in Ocala, Florida they received a Bachelor of Science degree in Photography from the University of Central Florida in 2012 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art from Florida State University in 2015. They have had their work shown nationally, and have been included in the permanent collection of the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Southeast Museum of Photography, and the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center For The Study of Visual Arts and Culture Of African Americans and the African Diaspora. They currently serve as Assistant Professor of Photography at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Adam Delphine Fawndu, the cleanse, 2019, video still. On loan courtesy of the artist.
I am a first generation American with parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. With my recent works I’ve been using my Mende heritage through my paternal grandmother’s lineage as a source of inspiration. The Mende’s are an ethnic group hailing from various parts of West Africa. A vast amount of people of African descent can trace the Mende ethnicity in their DNA. I am interested in how the Mende culture have shape shifted, transformed and evolved within the African Diaspora despite horrific societal disruptions such as colonialism and the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.
With “the cleanse” I thought about the cyclical idea of ritual as it mirrors the cycle of life.
For the Mende, beautiful hair is called kpotongo, which literally means “it is much, abundant, plentiful.” The root, kpoto, is used to describe things in nature that can be pulled together such as fruits on a tree and rice. The most significant thing about hair in Mende culture is that it grows, this symbolizes essence of life. It is important to wash it regularly and nurture it with herbs and natural oils. The maintenance of growth is essential.
With these concepts in mind, I created my own language made up of natural elements and diaspora references as metaphors and symbols. Like a hip-hop artist, I sampled trap music, spiritual texts, Mende harvest chants, and words from authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Erykah Badu, Alice Walker, Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, and Gayle Jones. These words are juxtaposed against vivid imagery of hair, water, “blood,” milk and cotton.
“the cleanse” is about healing as a natural occurrence.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist of Mende, Krim, Bamileke and Bubi descent. Her distinct visual language centers around themes of indigenization and the power in ancestral memory. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. For decades, she has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her awards include the The Catchlight Global Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, New York Foundation for The Arts Photography Fellowship and the Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant, among others, and she is a 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition finalist. Fawundu was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory to participate in the 100 Years | 100 Women Project / The Women’s Suffrage NYC Centennial Consortium (2019–2021). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Princeton University Museum;, Bryn Mawr College; The Petrucci Family Foundation of African American Art, Asbury, NJ; The Brooklyn Historical Society; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; The David C. Driskell Art Collection, College Park, MD; and a number of private collections. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.
André TERREL JACKSON
André Terrel Jackson, Mami Wata #8, On loan courtesy of the artist.
Mami Wata was conceived during a month-long residency at Guild House, a program through Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York. Mami Wata is the culmination of being one of the few Black people in a predominantly white community, walks to and from the beach, and ruminations on power and worship. Being near the ocean brings me a kind of peace that other spaces in nature simply cannot. As a fiber artist, I like to embody my wearable sculptures and tell different stories with my body. A continuation of my self-portraiture exploration, this series explores contemplation, power, worship and deification. I center the Fat, Black, Queer body in a way that forces each of us to face what we may fear: indulgence, vanity and vulnerability. Look at my nonbinary body and tell me she ain’t mutha.
André Terrel Jackson, Mami Wata #4, On loan courtesy of the artist.
André Terrel Jackson is interested in the individual experiences that add up to create social, political and cultural groups. Mining personal history, the artist is able to use poetry, weaving, sculpture, apparel and performance to spark conversation about difficult issues related to identity. Jackson is inspired by the work of artists from Sonya Clark and Nick Cave, Melina Matsoukas, Marlon Riggs and Tarrel Alvin McCraney; to musicians like Cakes Da Kill and Solange, Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe; to scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Amelia Jones, and bell hooks; to writers like Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam André uses language, visual / literal / metaphorical, to center the voices and images of blackness. Intersectionality is paramount, and influences the use of materials, which take the artist from the craft store, to the hardware store, from the quirky, to the fine and luxurious. The mixing, and juxtaposing, of materials lend humor and beauty to otherwise grave topics. Jackson received a BA in Fashion from Albright College and an MFA in Fibers from Savannah College of Art and Design.
TOMMY KHA
Tommy Kha, Kati, 2013. From the series Return to Sender. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Return to Sender is an ongoing body of work for which I ask friends, strangers, lovers, and ex-lovers to kiss me, and I don’t kiss them back.
Though I remain stoic and neutral, I become the object of desire by receiving the Kiss.
In my actions as the photographer/director—such as scouting locations, lighting, setting up the camera, and composing the frame—I begin to undermine my character’s passivity.
As the shutter’s long exposure captures this fleeting, intimate moment, I allow the Kissers control over their representation in our picture, adding another level of confusion to the roles of photographer and subject, director and actor, protagonist and supporting character, self-portrait and performance.
Tommy Kha, slides from the Return to Sender series. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, Tennessee) received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is the recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow, and a former resident at Light Work, the Camera Club of New York and an International Studios and Curatorial Program. He was named one of 47 artists in the inaugural Silver List.
His work has been published in NY Times, the New Yorker, Foam, Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Butt Magazine, Buzzfeed, Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” and Vice. He has collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles, and exhibited at Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Launch F18 (NYC), PS122 Gallery (NYC), Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), Teen Party (NYC), Brooks Museum (Memphis), Blue Sky (Portland), Ogden Museum of Southern Art (LA), Yongkang Lu Art (Shanghai), Hyères Festival (France), and Unseen Festival (Amsterdam).
He held his first solo show at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, which was followed by his New York solo debut at the Camera Club of New York in May 2019.
He appeared in Laurie Simmons’ narrative feature, My Art. He currently teaches at the New School and at Yale University. He joined Higher Pictures Generation in 2022. His first major publication, Half, Full, Quarter will be published by Aperture in February 2023.
AZYA LashellE
My artwork explores my personal journey with mental health. Having been diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses, I examine my personal relationship with vulnerability. Using photography and my own psych evaluations I physically and digitally redact information, allowing the viewer to be confronted only with the parts of me that I want seen. Within my artwork, I have posed myself in a way that mimics historical images of Black Americans throughout history, in order to recall the past and bring it to the present. I am interested in the way that transgenerational trauma impacts the mind and the ways that some of my experiences with mental health are due to the impact of racism on the generations that have come before me. With this work, I hope to add to the conversation of mental health awareness within the Black community.
Azya Lashelle, Redacted, Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) 2, 2022, inkjet print. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Azya Lashelle was born and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although she has a background in painting, she is currently working towards receiving her M.F.A. in Photography at Georgia State University. Through a photographic lens, Lashelle navigates the transgenerational trauma of slavery on the contemporary Black psyche. With the use of self-portraiture, she critiques the impacts that racism has had on her own mental health. Lashelle’s work poses the question that maybe it isn’t just a chemical imbalance that is the cause of her mental illnesses, but also the negative repercussions of racism.
Lorena Molina
I am referencing the history of ethnographic photographs of indigenous women. The women I loved and cared for balanced buckets on their heads to carry corn or masa in El Salvador. I draw a comparison between this task to the balancing act and burden of being a woman of color in academia/art spaces. I am thinking about the layers of my identity, the weight they carry, and the struggle that it is to attempt to conform and defy what is accepted in majority white institutions.
Lorena Molina, Balancing Act, 2019, video still. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Mangoes grow abundantly in El Salvador and I have used them previously in my work. In Mango Eating, I am using the gaze and the act of eating a mango to defy what’s accepted in art/academic institutions. Gendered and sexualized language is sometimes used to critique my body, my work, and my ability to belong. The mango eating is loud, messy, unapologetic, and enjoyable.
Lorena Molina, Mango Eating, 2019, video still. On loan courtesy of the artist.
These images (below) are part of the This must be the place series, which includes still life arrangements, landscapes, and portraits that represent and attempt to piece together what my home in the margins looks like. As well as a reconciliation, acceptance and celebration of the immigrant experience that seeks to center my experience and place in the world outside of the trauma of displacement thus creating a place that allows for joy, beauty, play, pleasure, slowness and decadence.
Lorena Molina, Coca, 2022, chromogenic print. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Lorena Molina, Como una Bruja, 2020, chromogenic print. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist and educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media in the School of Art at the University of Houston. She's also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists in Cincinnati.
She received her Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton, in 2012. Molina has been a recipient of the Diversity of Views and Experiences fellowship, (Two) Truth and Reconciliation grants from Artswave, and the Kala Art Institute fellowship. She has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally, such as the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, The Armory Show, The Kemper Museum, The Carnegie, Covington, KY, Vor Populi, Southeast Museum for Photography, and the Beijing Film Academy.
Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck
Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck, Neptune, 2020. From the series Shimmer Shimmer. Archival Pigment Print on Moab Baryta Rag paper. On loan courtesy of the artists.
Lorenzo Triburgo, Conjunction, 2020. From the series Shimmer Shimmer. Archival Pigment Print on Moab Baryta Rag paper. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Shimmer Shimmer draws influence from a history of queer visual activism, artists using New York City as a site of political disruption, and feminist use of the body as a political site - while staying true to my proclivity for camp aesthetics.
After 10 years of transgender “hormone therapy” I stopped taking testosterone as a durational performance begun during my residency at Baxter St CCNY. The desire to occupy new subjective space inspired the physical changes I am undergoing and the ensuing photographs in Shimmer Shimmer.
The figurative images in Shimmer Shimmer featuremy glitter-adorned nude form in familiar, gendered, art historical poses, photographed by my queer-femme partner Sarah Van Dyck on location at the historically gay section at the People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park in Queens, New York (known as Riis Beach), now a haven during the summer months for NYC queers. In Mars my figure is backed by the iconic, boarded-up sanatorium surrounded by barbed-wire fence that has come to symbolize this anti-assimilationist queer space. My trans*queer body stands strong in an implied forward motion while one arm reaches back and subtle highlights along my fingertips imply strength and hope for the future.
The shimmer of glitter on my figure suggests a mythical, celestial presence and hints at a connection to astrology, an important mode of spiritual connection for us and our queer community. The still lifes of glitter as “constellations” with titles such as Sextile and Conjunction (astrological aspects) reiterate this connection and signal to the viewer that the title Mars, for example, refers to the planet not the (gendered) god.
The performative de-medicalization of my body, layered atop subtle gestural shifts of hip position or shoulder height and the metaphorical use of glitter as a representation of change itself—ever-elusive, perceived differently according to light—culminate in binaries coming undone, collapsing into one another or being non-existent where one might expect them to surface.
Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck, Pluto, 2020. From the series Shimmer Shimmer. Archival Pigment Print on Moab Baryta Rag paper. On loan courtesy of the artist.
Lorenzo Triburgo is an artist who employs performance, photography, video and audio, often with their partner and collaborator Sarah Van Dyck, to elevate trans*queer subjectivity and abolitionist politics. Lorenzo was awarded a 2019 Workspace Residency at Baxter St/CCNY, an AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2020, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, (Chicago, IL) and Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR). Select exhibition venues include Bruce Silverstein, NYC; Photoforum Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Kunst und Kulturhaus, Berne, Switzerland; Dutch Trading Post, Nagasaki, Japan; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Magazzini del Sale di Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy; and Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Their writing and artworks have been featured in such publications as GLQ, Art Journal, GUP, and the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge).
Sarah Van Dyck is an Industrial-Organizational (I/O) psychologist who specializes in mixed methods research, blending and translating quantitative data with qualitative audio, visual, and narrative sources. Her research centers on gender and identity at work, occupational health psychology and disparities in underrepresented populations, and LGBTQIA research in applied settings. Sarah earned her PhD in Applied Psychology from Portland State University in 2021 and has conducted research with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Center on Work-Family Health and Stress.
In past and current collaborations with her partner, Lorenzo Triburgo, she created For Love Understood In Desire, Monumental Resistance: Stonewall, and Shimmer Shimmer—video, performance, and photographic projects that represent a call to action to fight for the issues she addresses in her research and life’s work. Sarah and Lorenzo live and work in Brooklyn, New York.
Lorenzo and Sarah’s co-authored essay “Representational Refusal and the Embodiment of Gender Abolition” was published in the peer-reviewed journal GLQ for the spring 2022 special issue, Queer Fire and Liberation.
JON WES
Jon Wes, I Never Knew I Could Love Myself This Much. From the series Teen Spirit. On loan courtesy of the artist.
In modern society, the teenage bedroom is one of the most ubiquitous curiosities. A sacred haven filled with an array of identity-forming paraphernalia, visual manifestations of adolescence and sprinklings of aspirational dreams. Its rich landscape of idiosyncratic emotion, desire and capriciousness has fed the themes found in Hollywood movies, chart-topping records and center-fold spreads, an endless cycle of inspiration, creation, performance and consumption of American youth culture. The end-result manifestation, high-gloss pages and newsprint clippings taped to bedroom walls and school-hall lockers historically exists as homogenous and heteronormative representations or distortions of reality.
Teen Spirit re-envisions LGBTQ representation in print media by offering a rich visual landscape of queer fever dreams, invented nightmares and still fantasies. Self-produced and self-displayed as an undistinguished movie-poster, a television promotion, or an editorial cover. The body, in defiance inches toward revolution by deconstructing the expectations of what it can or cannot be. Its performance of queerness imagines a future or revises a past in a self-fulfilling act of reclamation.
Jon Wes is a queer artist and commercial photographer based in Chicago, IL. He works closely with actors, performers, celebrities, and creators often highlighting stories and creating work by, for and within the LGBTQ+ community. His work has been exhibited through the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Chicago Athletic Association as well as in print through such publications as Billboard Magazine, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Reader and Chicago Ideas Week. In addition, he works as a teaching artist and guest lecturer at Latitude Chicago in studio portraiture and lighting technique.
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