cnvisualart

[cnvisualart]

Sitting Like Gordon With Bare-Back, Indigo and Shutter Release in Hand, (2018, Unpacking Sameness series) highlighted in @worcesterartmuseum X University podcast . In this model, students provide personal takes on works of art featured within the museum's permanent collection. It is truly an honor to have my work in conversation.

"To dismantle relations of power imbued within archival knowledge, as an intervention, one would have to remove the context of Western logic, white logic, from the formal praxis of the image. This framework of understanding is best articulated within my multimedia series, Unpacking Sameness (2018). I restage the renowned daguerreotype depicting the enslaved African female, Delia, daughter of Renty (1850). The photograph is one of several daguerreotypes commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz to support a theory of black inferiority. The photograph captured by Joseph T. Zealy features Delia’s bare torso within an ethnographic gaze. She is centered within the constructed shot and looks directly at the camera. Her eyes are glazed with tears. The relational system of vis-a-vis within the framed schema pits phenomenological blackness against the camera’s gaze that “others,” “silences,” and “erases.” It communicates to the spectator that Delia is inferior, a subcategory below “human.” One can only imagine the narrative that would unfold had Delia possessed the freedom to look away or the agency of self-representation. As an act of resistance, I made a conscious decision to exclude the framed organization of abject blackness within my artistic intervention. In Sitting Like Delia with Bare-Front, Indigo, and Shutter Release in Hand (2018), I place myself along the same field of reference as Delia, daughter of Renty. However, my eyes refuse the camera’s gaze, and the shutter gripped within my right-hand captures the image of myself. My work in conversation subverts archival knowledge, and operates across the schema of white logic. The camera’s gaze, in this respect, is aligned with my individual act of resistance. [...] In the disavowal of Aggazie, Zealy and Brady within the constructed shot, the image can be read as a reclamation of agency, a feminist act of empowerment, a self portrait or a counter-narrative that blurs framed binaries of gender and sex. In either direction, the context of white patriarchal logic is dismantled."

--Neptune, Christie. "The Archival As Intervention" in Ah New Riddim: A Marked (Black) Axiological Shift Across Space and Time, masters thesis in MIT Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2023), pg 45-50.

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#Repost @worcesterartmuseum with @use.repost

Christie Neptune uses her art to explore how we can honor and recognize black Americans who have been hurt by the history of photography. When subject have no choice in how or when they are photographed, their vulnerability is exploited. Through her works, Neptune gives agency to those who have suffered this fate, providing them with a sense of autonomy that they were not previously offered.

Clark University student Annie Overbaugh offers a personal take on Neptune’s works in the latest episode of the WAM x University podcast, out today. Once you’ve listened to this preview, find the full episode at the link in our bio, and subscribe on Spotify to make sure you hear new episodes when they’re released.

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/72MngahmR23RK3T2LsKuoJ?si=a39ec99cf43d425e

#Spotify

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I am happy to announce that I will begin research toward a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art at the University of Oxford, St. Catherines College, this Fall!

Last year, I introduced a mode of fine art practice entitled Marked (Black) Axiological Shifts within thesis research at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning program in Art, Culture, and Technology. Utilizing the marked conventions of urban visual culture, relational aesthetics, black feminist geographies, and digital computation, I attempted to move beyond the limits of geographical knowledge in visual articulations of representational space, particularly black space. During my two years at MIT, I scratched the surface of this discursive. With more time, I would like to delve deeper into this discussion, inviting specialists, collaborators from Oxford, and the greater community to participate in the fluid exchange of ideas and knowledge pivoting contemporary practices in black aesthetics.

As a doctoral candidate at Oxford's Ruskin School of Art, I will strengthen the coherence of my artistic language and approach through practice in the art studio. I intend to explore new points of entry into this discursive through the production of new time-based media and writing informed by my creative queries and thesis research, a grand departure from theory.

It is a great honor to be offered a place in a course at the University of Oxford. I look forward with much enthusiasm to joining Oxford's community of scholars, and making a meaningful contribution to the university's legacy.

Dominus illuminatio mea. England, here I come!

[cnvisualart]

Received my catalog from Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism at Lehman College Art Gallery featuring "A Guild of Light Shining Bright," 2020.

[cnvisualart]

#Repost @howard_photo with @use.repost

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Explore ‘CR II’ by Christie Neptune, where 'Constructs and Context Relativity: Performance II’ challenges our understanding of space and communication. Through diaristic reflections and improvisations, this exhibition prompts you to question the coded systems that shape our lives, inviting a unique blend of introspection and imagination. #howardphoto#historyofblackphotographers

Link: bit.ly/470iOFb

[cnvisualart]

A Guild of Light Shining Bright, 2020 Archival Inkjet Print, 30 x 30 inches, 5 editions + 2 APs

En Route Towards El Dorado: Deepened Relations and The Descent Back Home

[cnvisualart]

I had a great time at last night’s opening for Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism at Lehman College Art Gallery. It’s a great show I encourage you all to see featuring a phenomenal roster of women artists doing critical work across photography, sculpture, mixed media and painting.

Framing the Female Gaze vitally connect us to political and social issues and to the cultural and social discriminations that women experience now. The works in this exhibition show how women artists today focus their gaze on both women and men. Artists are magicians: they seek subjects for their work from the past, then with new images change what we thought we knew. The artists in Framing the Female Gaze looked at the art of the 19th-century which marked the beginning of Modernism, of seeing and being seen as conscious subject matter.

Exhibition Venues and Dates: Lehman College Art Gallery, 250 Bedford Park West, Bronx, NY lehmangallery.org October 10, 2023 – January 20, 2024

Link: https://lehmangallery.org/framing-the-female-gaze/

[cnvisualart]

I am so happy to announce that I am participating in @lightworkorg 50th Anniversary Print Sale Fundraiser! Purchase my print “Promises, Vacant Lots, and The Latency of Urban Renewal,” (Dixwell, New Haven, ca. 2019), 2019 through the link in Light Work’s bio, or at lw50.org.

TWO WEEKS ONLY! Light Work is hosting a print sale fundraiser to celebrate their 50th anniversary as an organization. Their mission is to provide direct support to artists working in photography and related media, through residencies, publications, and a community-access lab facility. 200+ Artists. All Prints $150. All net proceeds support Light Work’s programming. Ends Oct 20 at midnight EST. Link in bio. #LW50thPrintSale

For five decades Light Work has been a springboard for artists working in photography from all over the world. We are mounting this fundraiser to grow our support for the next generation of artists. Over 200 artists have contributed images for this limited-time sale! Don’t miss out!

Light Work was founded as an artist-run non-profit organization in 1973. Light Work’s mission is to provide direct support to emerging and under-recognized visual artists working in photography and related lens based media through artist residencies, exhibitions, projects, and publications. Light Work invites twelve artists to participate in the Artist-in-Residence program every year. More than 500 artists have participated at pivotal early stages in their careers.

Link: https://lw50.org

#LW50thPrintSale #christieneptune

[cnvisualart]

Upcoming Exhibition | Framing The Female Gaze at Lehman College Art Gallery

I am happy to share that I am exhibiting "A Guild of Light Shining Bright," (2020) in Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism at Lehman College Art Gallery. The Show opens October 10, 2023, and will run until January 20, 2024. Opening reception: October 18, 5 - 8 pm. The works of 45 contemporary women artists are reminiscent of paintings of women by French 19th-century male artists, then are framed by their own new views of women. Sixty works are on view in Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism at Lehman College Art Gallery, with a complementary focus exhibition at The Hall of Fame Art Gallery at Bronx Community College. The women who loom large on canvases, in photographs, prints, sculpture and collage in Framing the Female Gaze vitally connect us to political and social issues and to the cultural and social discriminations that women experience now. The works in this exhibition show how women artists today focus their gaze on both women and men. Artists are magicians: they seek subjects for their work from the past, then with new images change what we thought we knew. The artists in Framing the Female Gaze looked at the art of the 19th-century which marked the beginning of Modernism, of seeing and being seen as conscious subject matter.

The artists exhibiting work in Framing the Female Gaze include Lara Alcantara Lansberg, Lizzy Alejandro, Elise Ansel, Claudia Doring Baez, Cecily Brown, Elinor Carucci, Jordan Casteel, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Katie Commodore, Camille Eskell, Lalla Essaydi, Martha Edelheit, Rose FreymuthFrazier, Scherezade Garcia, Kathleen Gilje, Guerrilla Girls, Eunice Golden, Jenna Gribbon, Mimi Gross, Hilary Harkness, Lewinale Havette, Vera Iliatova, Ayana V. Jackson, Cheyenne Julien, Fay Ku, Yushi Li (in collaboration with Steph Wilson), Shona McAndrew, Marilyn Minter, Jesse Mockrin, Christie Neptune, Deborah Ory and Ken Browar, Phyllis Gay Palmer, Cecilia Paredes, Celeste Rapone, Arlene Rush, Julia Santos Solomon, Sylvia Sleigh, Jessica Spence, Devorah Sperber, Mickalene Thomas, Sharon Wybrants, Judith Wyer, Allison Zuckerman.

Exhibition Venues and Dates: Lehman College Art Gallery, 250 Bedford Park West, Bronx, NY lehmangallery.org October 10, 2023 – January 20, 2024 Reception October 18, 5 - 8 pm

Link: https://lehmangallery.org/framing-the-female-gaze/

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"The overarching goal of the Constructs and Context Relativity (CCR) series is to investigate how the roles of “absence” and “presence” inform productions of space. Through video, sculpture, photography, and performance, I explore the material and immaterial productions of perceived, conceived and lived space within the American urban. The series, in abstract, draws reference from Henri Lefebvre’s (French philosopher and sociologist) theoretical concepts around space production, the notion of space as a social product defined by its relations between people and objects. CCR bleeds this basic understanding of space into artistic practice and attempts to establish a new framework of understanding around black representational space in urban visual culture." --Christie Neptune

[cnvisualart]

On Saturday, September 16, 2023, during my exhibition's closing reception, my community members of East Flatbush and I visibly marked across space. The words of my thesis materialized and manifested through the activation of spatial practice and objects in relation. It was sublime, to say the least. A powerful gesture that brought us all 'back home.'

I read excerpts from my thesis over the riddim's digital line mixed by the music selector and channeled through graded drivers' of my sound system. Together, we celebrated the preservation of our story, culture, and point of view across the walls of white space. We did not need a curator to validate our narrative, collectors to confirm our worth, or critics to immortalize our story, the armatures of an elitist system upheld by universals. We did it for ourselves—a true cultural hegemonic shift.

The overarching goal of the Constructs and Context Relativity (CCR) series is to investigate how the roles of "absence" and "presence" inform productions of space. Through video, sculpture, photography, and performance, I explore the material and immaterial productions of perceived, conceived and lived space within the American urban. The series, in abstract, draws reference from Henri Lefebvre's (French philosopher and sociologist) theoretical concepts around space production, the notion of space as a social product defined by its relations between people and objects. Ah, New Riddim bleeds this basic understanding of space into artistic practice and attempts to establish a new framework of understanding around black representational space in urban visual culture. In a pivot around my embodied experience as a black Caribbean, I consider the potential of popular culture in marking space.

Unlike previous iterations of the Construct and Context Relativity Series, I have much at stake in Ah New Riddim. On the one hand, there is the preservation of my community's history, interior, spatial practices, and semiotics. On the other, it is a direct challenge to power: cultural gatekeepers and intellectuals who decide what is art, what gets preserved, what is seen, who becomes the "keeper" of the archives, historical artifacts, etc. I found agency in challenging this system and, most importantly, weaponizing my point of view.

My objective with this particular edition was not to provide a comprehensive understanding of dancehall. We have a bank of excellent source material for that already. I acknowledge that in research and theory. Dancehall, for me, is an entry into a conversation about space, the implosion of culture, globality, and the emergence of new sensibilities of knowing and seeing across space. It is my intervention.

Read Thesis Paper [HERE]

#Vimeo #Instagram

[cnvisualart]

Upcoming | Artist Talk + Performance

Join me closing night for an artist talk and interactive performance highlighting my exhibition and thesis Ah New Riddim at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project space.

Ah New Riddim (2023), is an immersive multi-channel installation and interactive documentary that examines the spatial-temporal relations of memory and place embedded within the implosion of dancehall culture in East Flatbush. The film and installation utilizes 80’s dancehall archival footage of my father, the quiet of black subjectivity, and concentric interactive storytelling to expound the relationship between black globality, and dancehall in the American urban. In a pivot around my embodied experience as a black Caribbean, I consider the potential of popular culture in marking space. 

September 16, 2023m 4pm-8pm Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space Inside Essex Market, 88 Essex St #21, New York, NY 10002

Exhibition Link: https://www.artistsallianceinc.org/ah-new-riddim/

Thesis Paper: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/151230

#christie neptune #dancehall #performanceart #performance #artist talk #nyc #art exhibition

[cnvisualart]

Upcoming Exhibition | BUBUIA: The 1st Bienal das Amazônias at Comércio, in Belém, Pará, Amazon.

I am happy to announce that I am one of the 121 selected artists to participate in the first iteration of the Bienal das Amazônias in Belém, Pará, Amazon. The title for this year’s edition is Bubuia (Female noun: act or effect of floating, floating on water). The bienal launches August 04, 2023 under the seal of the creative quartet: Flavya Mutran, artist and researcher who has been working in the field of Art and Communication since 1989; Keyna Eleison, current artistic director of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), researcher and curator; by independent curator Vânia Leal, specialist in Art History, Master in Communication, Language and Culture; and by Sandra Benites, assistant curator of the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). At the head of the artistic direction of the Bienal das Amazônias is Yasmina Reggad, co-curator of the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).

Show Run: August 04, 2023 to November 12, 2023

Link: https://www.bienalamazonias.com.br/

[cnvisualart]

(Installation photo credit: Hai Zhang)

Exhibition | Ah New Riddim: A Marked (Black) Axiological Shift at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space

Can the axiologies and stories oscillating at the margins mark the discourse of Western logic positioned at the center, and how might this marking register in visual representations of the urban?

Ah New Riddim (2023) is the third and final iteration of the multimedia series Constructs and Context Relativity (2019-2023) by interdisciplinary artist Christie Neptune. The installation and interactive documentary examines the spatial-temporal relationship of memory and place embedded within the implosion of dancehall culture in East Flatbush. The film utilizes 80’s dancehall archival footage, the quiet of black subjectivity, and concentric interactive storytelling to expound the relationship between black globality and dancehall in the American urban. In a pivot around her embodied experience as a black Caribbean American, Neptune considers the potential of black popular culture in marking space.

In Ah New Riddim, concentric storytelling registers a cacophony of black perspectives. Neptune’s subjective experience in the American urban and the migration stories of community members in East Flatbush pivot around dancehall home video of Neptune’s father. Research, writing, and art produced from this series work to frame an artistic intelligence around Marked Axiological Shifts, a concept introduced by Neptune in a recent essay that defines a new language in visual culture grounded in African world-making cosmologies.

Marked Axiological Shifts are nonlinear and interactive artistic approaches that register a perpetual reimagining of black futures across space and time. It marks the decorum of modern cinema and visual culture with the conventions of African temporality to foster multiple planes of perspectives and fields of movement within concentric forward moving narratives mapped across moving images, sculpture, performance art, and print. In this exhibition, six channels of video interface with scaffolded speakers made of mirror, LED monitors, and wood. The speakers, a re-articulation of the Caribbean Sound System tradition, add further nuance to the filmic encounter in space. As material, screen, haptic surface, and sculptural unit, the sound system transmits information that doubles the spectator’s spatial perception. Upon contact, the spectator experiences temporal disjuncture caused by the collapse of their point of view, embodied form, and projected media upon the unit’s reflective surface. The gesture fosters multiple fields of viewing within a single expressive form, an element integral to African frameworks of temporality.

Ah New Riddim demonstrates the potential of black popular culture within representational practices that speaks across both dominant and marginal spatialities. This new framework of understanding considers the agency of marked axiological shifts within discursive urban space, an intervention that superimposes a wide aperture of black subjectivity(s) upon the narrow plane of the American urban.

This exhibition draws from Christie Neptune’s research paper “Ah New Riddim: A Marked (Black) Axiological Shift Across Space and Time” [READ HERE]

August 04, 2023 to September 16, 2023 Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space Inside Essex Market, 88 Essex St #21, New York, NY 10002

Exhibition Link: https://www.artistsallianceinc.org/exhibitions/

Thank you to every supporter who contributed to make this exhibition happen:

Foundation of Contemporary Art, MIT Council of the Arts, MIT Art, Culture, and Technology program, Artist Alliance Inc., Cecile Chong, Emily B. Yang, Tariku Shiferaw, Larry Cook, Ayesha Charles, Jenna Charles, Terence Washington, David Freedman, Claire Watson, Mike Tan, Jodi Waynberg, Micaela Martegani, Jeff Swinton, Carl Hazelwood, Aisha White, Milk Spawn, Cari Sarel, Vivian Chui, Paul So, Camilo Alvarez, Kelsey Scott, Mike Brown, Darla Migan and Mary Lee Hodgens.

[cnvisualart]

M.S. in Art, Culture, and Technology from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

I did it! I would like to thank everyone who supported me and gave me positive words of encouragement during this process. Thank you to the moon and beyond for your continued support! #MITCommencement2023 #mitalumni

[cnvisualart]

2023 Tribeca Festival Artist Awards Program

2023 Tribeca Festival Artist Awards Program from Tribeca on Vimeo.

Very excited and honored to be participating in this year’s Tribeca Festival and Chanel Official 2023 Artists Awards Program organized by Racquel Chevremont!

For the 18th Artist Awards Program, the Tribeca Festival and Chanel Official have brought together a remarkable, all-woman cohort of 10 esteemed artists to generously donate original works, which will be presented to winning filmmakers of the Festival.

For more information visit: https://tribecafilm.com/artawards

[cnvisualart]

Hi All! 

I am doing an open performance rehearsal today in ACT's Cube from 4 pm to 5 pm. I will be testing performance material for the forthcoming solo exhibition of my thesis, Ah New Riddim. 

Ah New Riddim (2023), is an immersive multi-channel installation and interactive documentary. I utilize archival footage of my father, the quiet of subjectivity, and concentric interactive storytelling to examine the spatial-temporal relations of memory and place embedded within the implosion of dancehall culture in East Flatbush. In a pivot around my embodied experience as a black Caribbean in the American urban, I consider the potential of popular culture in marking space. I ask: Can the axiologies and stories oscillating the margins mark the false universalism of the center, and how might this marking register in visual representations of the urban?

Ah New Riddim will open at Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space Summer 2023.

Location:  ACT Cube | 20 Ames Street, E15-212 (MIT Wiesner Building), Cambridge, MA 02142. 

[cnvisualart]

What you see is an AI generated image, depicting an older version of myself. I did not capture this image. I typed a sentence into an online AI generator and the following image populated. The image took less than a minute to produce and its proximity to my vision was contingent upon how descriptive my text was. Although its plasticity is grounded in my vision, its visual representation is still subject to chance. I am still processing the implications of all this, invisible and hyper-visible. Where does the line between AI and image maker begin and end? 

The process uses an algorithm to source from a host of images posted online to generate the imagined image. For this reason, and this reason alone I beg the question, is this art? Is it a telling example of appropriation? Assemblage? Plagiarism? It is technically the material production of my imagination, but does this image meet the criteria for art?

Although this is as far as I am willing to go in image production regarding this artistic approach and methodology, I will most certainly write a paper interrogating the implications of this new medium. In the interim, I would love to hear your thoughts on AI generated art. Please feel free to elaborate in your contest or adoration for this medium.

Credit: AI image generated by Midjourney. 

#ai generated #what is art