Interview with the Daily Lazy
Splendor: Gone altogether beyond, 2021
I’m excited to share that I was interviewed for the Daily Lazy by artist and editor, Irini Miga about my project, Splendor and my upcoming solo exhibition of the project at the University of Rochester’s Hartnett Gallery.
Irini Miga: In your work you speak about the re-imagination of the relationship between the Black body and the American landscape. When I hear this, I feel a powerful sense of gaining strength and sharing it with the world. What experiences with the natural environment sparked this reimagining for you?
Corinne Spencer: One of my central interests as an artist is considering the tensions of belonging for Black people, particularly for Black women, in the United States. In my personal life, I have a deep interest in contemplative spiritual practice. I’ve explored many different meditative practices and have had experiences with non-dual awareness in which the ordinary perception of subject/object separation between myself and the world has dropped away. These experiences have allowed me to understand that not only do I belong in the world, I am fundamentally, inextricably interwoven with the world.
This is a spiritual understanding which stands in great contrast to the social reality of living in white supremacist America as a Black woman. To be a Black woman in America is to fight for your visibility, your right to take up space, your sense of belonging, dignity, and peace. None of these things come freely and the battle to claim them for yourself is fierce.
As I worked on Splendor in rural Western New York and moved between the verdant, life-giving natural world and racially antagonistic social spaces, I felt the same tensions: a deep spiritual understanding of my intrinsic belonging on one side and the danger and alienation of racist white America on the other.
The Black Lives Matter protests were at their height as I was working through these tensions. The movement’s demand for freedom, dignity, safety and peace resonated strongly with me, and I began to think about how to create home in the land, a place of refuge in my work. For the most part, the images that we have culturally inherited of Black people interacting with the America landscape are linked with America’s brutal history of chattel slavery. Images of Black people experiencing leisure, joy, serenity, and spiritual communion are largely absent.
Splendor seeks to fill in this absence. In the face of violence, trauma, and alienation I wanted to create work that was rooted in love, romance, tenderness, joy, and homecoming.
To read the entire interview, visit The Daily Lazy.