“What is the labor required to make worlds? This is the question my art practice—audiovisual, painting, sound, film, writing—attempts to think with. To ask the question of the labor it takes to make worlds—a kind of labor that can be used in, but also sometimes against the political economy— is to think about affect, physicality, materiality, texture, weight, spirit, flesh. Whether writing, or art practice, what is the work?

How do my practices work on me, how do they produce what poet Fred Moten calls a dispossessive force such that I am infused, changed, by that which I am creating? Such that the question of labor, too, is about who and what is being created, made, fashioned: is the work making me as I make things? And how do the things made with my hands, feet, voice, work on those that encounter them? And how does this labor break down the distinction between the maker and made, creator and created, subject and object? The labor to make worlds is performance.

My practice is an interdisciplinary approach to audio, visual, and choreographic methods. I use choreography to create mystical paintings, dancing—what Blackpentecostals call “shouting”—on paper or canvas with pigment powder, clapping my hands with paint, letting it splatter on surfaces, sometimes singing, based on the rhythms of the Blackpentecostal Church. I use paint, ink, canvas, paper, and other surfaces to visualize that which remains after my body moves to the sound of the praise music, to more fully consider residue, lingering, that escapes capture. My art practice lets me think about the ways the religious as a conceptual domain and field of thought has sequestered, and in sequestering not holding with care, particular kinds of meditative, transformative, collective modes of existence, reflection, behavior. With audiovisual practices, I have occasion to think about hiddenness, about the practice of composing and constructing, of putting ideas and concepts and colors and sounds together, taking them apart.

For SSG, I use multiple methods to create the pieces: I shout on paper with pigment powder, acrylic paint, ink and I play the tambourine with paint on my hands to let it splatter on the paper’s surface. After a period of varnishing, I rip the paper up to use them as pieces in the silhouette. The silhouettes in this series are of black worshippers in various religious traditions, primarily Christian and Muslim. But I also include silhouettes of blackqueer people in the ballroom scene, dancing, voguing, in sharp and hyperbolic fleshly gestures. Taking the torn shouting pieces and combining them with decorative paper, tissue paper, dyed hymns, I remake the image otherwise than the original, trying to discover beauty as critique, critique and critical engagement as beautiful. This is a reiterative process because with each new silhouette painting created, I make a print of it, tear up the print and use the print in subsequent pieces. The point is to take what was given and to repurpose it, to take what was made and to use it to make beautiful things over and over again. Like taking the Blackpentecostal praise of my youth and ripping it up, critically engaging it, and putting it together anew.”

- Ashon Crawley

ABOUT THE ARTISTS