April 27 – June 16, 2019
Gallery Reception: Saturday, May 4, 4-6pm
CPW is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring Daesha Devón Harris, and her thought-provoking, graceful mixed media compositions addressing the flight to freedom of African-American slaves. Poetic and moving in words and imagery alike, Harris’s one-of-a-kind pieces take an unflinching look at our history one person at a time. The true stories behind the figures depicted are lost to history. However, she breathes life back into these found images, creating new back stories that are anchored by artifacts within the frame and text that the artist has etched into the glass. Harris participated in CPW’s residency program, Woodstock AIR, in 2017. Her exhibition is part of a year-long celebration of the program’s twentieth anniversary. Woodstock AIR was created in 1999 to support photography-based artists of color, and to expand the dialogue around diversity, race and identity within the context of social justice.
I do not need Freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Quite simply family, history and landscape are three interconnected and continual sources of inspiration to me. Growing up my greatest joy was exploring both the urban and pastoral landscape of my immediate and extended home. These outings allowed me to not only experience familial traditions connected to the landscape but also to learn personal and cultural history. The stories that my family told entranced me and compelled me to seek out the missing stories—those untold and those of forgotten kinfolk. In my work I enjoy combining elements from both shared narratives and those that are specific to myself.
The selected pieces from my “Just Beyond the River” series are inspired by Negro Folklore, Slave Narratives and Harlem Renaissance poetry. This work aims to illuminate America’s aged but enduring cultural, historical and societal ideologies regarding race, while reiterating the central narrative that emerges from the referenced memoirs—the ongoing struggle for Freedom. By using elements from these stories in combination with unidentified historical images and aquatic landscapes this work claims the significant contributions and sacrifices that our ancestors gave civilization in both life and in death and acknowledges the burden of social constructs that to this day continue to threaten people of color.
This series is about the Black experience that is deeply connected to the landscape, the idea of home and its intersections with water. Water becomes symbolic of Freedom whether it is in this world or the next and at the same time is evidence of social and cultural boundaries. Water has to be crossed on the journey to Freedom.
My process always begins with extensive amounts of research, collecting stories, references, imagery, memorabilia etc. In this series I have incorporated a personal collection of unidentified carte de visites and cabinet card portraits. After creating a transparent version of a specific portrait, I then take the transparency to a local body of water, collect flora from the area, place the transparency in the water and arrange an aquatic still life, which I then photograph. The resulting image with a layered visual effect is in fact a single frame. The locations where each of the images are shot are all waters in and around my home region, and because of the locality, hold meaningful associations both personally and historically. The trail begins in my hometown of Saratoga and ends North at Timbuctoo (the revolutionary free Black settlement in North Elba, NY).
The thought of “home” has always been a comfort and an inspiration to me: the concept, people, places, history and the actual physical structure. My work explores this theme as it relates to the African American experience, and the issues that encompasses—notably community, race and class.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daesha Devón Harris is a Saratoga Springs, NY artist and photographer, who has spent time in Buffalo, NY, and San Francisco, CA. Both her multi-cultural family and the unexpected death of her young father have greatly shaped her life. She is a member of various organizations and plays an active role in her community as a youth advocate, social activist and cultural history preservationist.
The gentrification of her hometown and its effect on the local Black community has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork. Most recently Harris has been an En Foco Fellowship winner, MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute Fellow, an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the recipient of an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, and named one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines.
Harris was recently featured in the Smithsonian Magazine (April 2019). Read article.
Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts for their support of this exhibition.
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE AND LOCATION
CPW’s three exhibitions Just Beyond the River. A FolkTale by Daesha Devón Harris, Making the Invisible Visible: Ruben Natal-San Miguel, and Woodstock AIR: Housed will be on view through June 16, 2019. CPW galleries are free & open to the public Thursday – Sunday, 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. Please note that special hours apply during the holidays. Educational tours are available upon request. CPW is located at 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498.