Glassell Gallery presents That Survival Apparatus by LSU School of Art MFA candidate Justin Tyler Bryant. The MFA Thesis Exhibition will be on display April 3-April 7, 2018. The reception will be Saturday, April 7, 6-8 p.m.

Artist Statement

As a point of departure, my work uses the poem “Mask” by Maya Angelou as a lens to view various black mediascapes. Central to this idea are notions of black fugitivity, improvisation, and negation. This position questions notions of the archive and how it thinks of itself in relation to African diasporic ontology. The work is concerned with how things are kept and dispersed in black culture. Because of such concerns, there is a strategy within the imagery to leave things rendered visible and in other places invisible. The work is not concerned with changing this positionality in an explicit way that makes aware a critique, but rather the function of the work is to seek for a more implicit critique that brings about an understanding of ontology that is not always revealed on the surface. 

A point of departure, my work uses the poem “Mask” by Maya Angelou as a lens to view various black mediascapes. Central to this idea are notions of black fugitivity, improvisation, and negation. This position questions notions of the archive and how it thinks of itself in relation to African diasporic ontology. The work is concerned with how things are kept and dispersed in black culture. Because of such concerns, there is a strategy within the imagery to leave things rendered visible and in other places invisible. The work is not concerned with changing this positionality in an explicit way that makes aware a critique, but rather the function of the work is to seek for a more implicit critique that brings about an understanding of ontology that is not always revealed on the surface.