Jahi Kijo Lendor

 A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.” With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic drawn boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting.

I use more quotidian materials as interventions in my work versus more traditional materials and mediums. The things I recover and use are representations of human existence that I have an intuitive, personal connection and/or affinities to. Those charged objects, materials, and things are loaded with their own histories and convey a particular immediacy and agency that consistently informs my practice. Things such as tar, concrete, magazine/newspaper clippings, chewed gum, and other myriads of detritus find their way into my work forming my own abstract language. Form, feelings, scale, and time converse through care and unconventional processes.

The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life and my environment, which translates to a multimelaninated reality of my experience. I’m learning and pulling from history and retelling and making a new history from the present within the present. Like the wildstyle subway graffiti artists, I’m stating “I WAS HERE”.