Mara Duvra and Prerna

And When the Sun Rises by Mara Duvra
Mara Duvra will combine photographic images and poetic text to create her exhibition And When the Sun Rises. This exhibition continues to build on her larger body of work, Tending: meditations on interiority and Blackness, an ongoing project that centers softer visual representations of women of color, using poetic and ephemeral imagery to understand Blackness beyond public identities. This will be an installation of interior landscapes that encourage stillness and reflection. 

"This is a meditation on longing / on interiority and Blackness / on self-definition and a process of becoming / on feeling / on moments that fracture and the surreality of otherness / on morning light and devotion / on words that cling to flesh / on emotional and visual motifs / on flesh /on fragments from another day / a silent elsewhere / a tender seam."  – Mara Duvra 

Today, we become by Prerna
Prerna’s performative installation, Today, we become, is an ever-changing installation until it eventually disappears. Prerna’s work questions our need to conceal unseen systems and our compliance with forceful self-categorization, frequently referencing her own experiences as a non-resident alien. The white walls of the gallery will become the sculptural canvas for this exhibition. The inherent whiteness of these walls falsely present as a symbol of neutrality. Through the course of the exhibition she will explore this environment that is defined by pristine emptiness, and will work towards reverting the space back to that emptiness. Asking the question of what happens if an empty white cube is all that is there. 

"I set conditions for my projects that are intended for the end result to counteract my alterations and restore the material back to its original state. The systems I’m dissecting exude hierarchical power and rely on expendability, impermanence, and categorization to maintain a permanent state of temporariness for an individual. This temporariness then translates into the labor that I perform, the place which I occupy, and the state of my being."  — Prerna