Nobody’s Fool

Nobody’s Fool
October 23 – November 7, 2021
Opening: October 23rd @ Carnation Contemporary, 5 – 8 pm
Curated by Ella Ray

Nobody’s Fool is a group exhibition, featuring the work of ariella tai, Azha Ayanna Luckman, Kendyl Boyd, Mariah Green, Melanie Stevens, and Nia Musiba, that captures overlapping and divergent articulations of Black alternative realities. Through painting, photography, video, and printmaking, these artists explore how revenge, play, intimacy, and humor materialize when we have the space to operate beyond survival. Rooted in a desire to actualize these environments and ecosystems, namely those more gentle, truthful, and pleasurable for black people, the exhibition attempts to emphasize contemporary artists utilizing world-building and -dismantling as formal and conceptual frameworks.

The objects presented, ranging from afrofuturist cartographic renderings of deep space to large-scale self portraiture where “the blur” both obscures and sharpens the body, provide an opportunity to assess the role medium and technique play in artists’ ability to build microcosms and multiverses within their work.

The exhibition takes up the Black feminist pursuit of seriously and thoughtfully engaging with dreams. Nobody’s Fool asks: What would your world feel, look, or sound like if you didn’t have to modify your fantasies in relation to increasingly hostile realities? What would you amplify, glitch, flip, process, retract, or destroy to make it to the other side?

This exhibition is invested in the journey and the final destination, in processes and conclusions.

The title, Nobody’s Fool, is respectfully borrowed from the poem Resolution #1003 by June Jordan. June Jordan has provided many maps for exploration and autonomy, making alternatives feel possible.

I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
in response to passionate and eager love

I will be nobody’s fool
— June Jordan, Resolution #1,003