Living requires us to remember. But how does one live, thrive, dream about futures when so much of one’s memories have been erased; when remembering requires our bodies to relive the violence and shame of the past, making forgetting a form of protection? How do we live fully when the landscape we encounter daily holds histories of our subjection? And how might we craft postcolonial futures in this landscape, the same arena as our abjection?

In the wake of catastrophic histories, La Vaughn Belle’s generative practice is activated by a belief that myth and memory are not only foundational to collective identity but are necessary for life. While memories tend to be tethered to an event that has been directly experienced, myths are negotiated, may have multiple versions and are capable of reinvention. They are open and continual discourses that are alive.

Belle’s art takes form amidst memory and myth being as lieu de mémoire. In recent years her multimodal conceptual art practice has been concerned with creating myths, maps, monuments, and memories through aesthetic forms that work to draw the past into the present while gesturing towards futures we can imagine and inhabit. The work that comprises this exhibition is grounded in this ethos and in process, asserts a similar claim to life. The videos, sculptures, digital collages, and paper collage paintings, all draw on decolonial practices of refashioning, reimagining, and rebuilding in process and content. They invite audiences to imagine a world where the weight of history is lighter and one can step into a liberated future, unbound.

Curated by Erica Moiah James, PhD

Art Historian, Curator, and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami