April 7th - April 30th, 2019
Art Walk - Thursday, April 11th 5 to 9pm
Shop this exhibit.
I want to live in a world in which every micro-aggression, attack on humanity, and doubt of divinity aimed at Black Women is destroyed by aggressively Femme, future-sent deities. These Goddesses are enveloped and adorned by magnificent cornrows, dreadlocks and twists. The hairstyles act as armor and weapon, protecting and repelling wearers from white supremacy and misogyny. These are the beings I create. My wildest dreams realized; a marriage between the spectral beings we (as Black people) can and will transform into as a result of the culture we currently live in with the majesty, magic and tradition of our ancestors.
My work envisions a cosmically bountiful world where Blackness is a manifestation of the divine. This “divine technology” develops as a means of survival; an adaptation that gives us the power to thrive in a future that does not embrace our existence. A cranium consumed, overpowered and obscured by the growth of hair and in doing so transforming into another species entirely. Part alien, part spirit these gods are the protectors and the protected becoming what correct society simultaneously fetishizes and abhors.
These Future Ancestors are my response to, and escape from the many ways Black bodies are policed and demonized; white America’s historical repulsion to Black hair and the more contemporary fetishization and appropriation of Black hairstyles within popular culture. They are the gatekeepers of my rage and sadness, projections of power and freedom, cast onto an otherworldly reality.
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter is a mixed media artist who works and resides in Upstate New York. In January 2018 she was awarded a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, and will attend a residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY and The Wassaic Project in spring/summer 2019. In April 2018 she had her first solo show at Ori Gallery in Portland, OR and has exhibited Nationally at Collar Works, Troy, NY; Virago Gallery, Seattle; Concepto Gallery, Hudson, NY; Paradice Palase, Brooklyn; Iridian Gallery, Richmond, VA; Archer Gallery, Clark College, Vancouver, WA and White Gallery, Portland State University, Portland, OR. She received both her Bachelors and Masters in Art from SUNY Albany with a concentration in drawing and painting.
Her luminous work envisions a speculative Afro-Futuristic dimension where Blackness represents both a breaking open of nothingness and a densely lustrous opportunity for the genesis of a new world.
Sikelianos-Carter asserts that Black features are a manifestation of a sacred and divine technology that have served as a means of survival, both physically and metaphysically. She envision a cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to ancestral majesty, power and aesthetics.
Inspired by traditionally African and Black-American hairstyles, she uses web and catalogue sourced images to construct these new saviors. Through large scale paintings and the employment of luminescent materials she is creating a mythology that is centered on Black resistance and utilizes the body as a sight of alchemy and divinity.