I am a visual artist living and working in Irvington, NJ. I use paint, mixed media, and clay to create art objects that seek to honor Black, Queer spirituality, liberation, and autonomy in the physical and metaphysical planes.
I am interested in Black queer people’s physical and metaphysical well-being and self-understanding. “Black” and “queer” are signifiers that have been used to inflict violence, but to also to create homes: communal and psychological protection from violent, oppressive systems, and as a space to process and release the power dynamics and harmful ideologies that these systems instill on an individual and collective level.
I create vignettes of a psyche shaped by Black, queer spirituality, liberation, and autonomy, and the cycles of trauma and healing that come with them. I intend for each piece to act as a portal, traversing time and space and guiding the viewer to a different emotional state, experience, or understanding of the physical and metaphysical, the earthly and the intangible. I utilize the introspective potential of darkness and the erotic materiality of paint, clay, and mixed media to create pieces that reflect Afrofuturistic ideas of beauty, intimacy, spirituality, and lineage. Association with the cosmos, environmental forms, textures of the black body, and materials associated with Black adornment bring the viewer into a visual landscape where blackness and queerness holds multiplicity, even within a limited space.
I incorporate craft and beauty materials and techniques in my work to embrace legacies of embodied empowerment and historically devalued and gendered labor and modes of creativity. The work celebrates self-adornment, ancestry, self-awareness, and the complexity and beauty of individual experiences - emotional, sensual, generational, and more - with an awareness of the ability of blackness and queerness to subvert hierarchical and oppressive systems on a collective and interpersonal level. My work revels in the integrated space where we acknowledge the negative impacts of oppression and violence on our bodies, minds, and spirits while embracing the parts of ourselves that resist and dismantle that bondage through already being free.
Contact:
Christa.B.Pratt@gmail.com