Shani Strand: 100% Salt
August 6 - 30, 2020Opening Reception: August 6, 6-9PM
“Sel pa vante tèt li di li sale.”
Salt doesn’t boast that it is salted.
100% Salt is the first solo exhibition of Shani Strand in New York City at HOUSING. The work investigates the pathology of colonialism and industrialization in Jamaica. This investigation informs the artist’s own personal interpretation of cultural iconography through the centering of their family linage and self. Christianity, sugar plantations, and corrosion of and from creolization - often the default of relation in Caribbean aesthetics and hyphenated identities. Sculptures mimic the infrastructure of a landscapes that have informed and crafted the artists identity.
Curated by KJ Freeman
Ghosts.
Personal Metonyms ~Historical Metonyms.
Exactly what they are and more than what they are, traces tracing the past in the present.
The choices are always Armageddon or Babylon more than Heaven or Hell - do you ever choose or are you constantly choosing because there is no choice.
I’m gonna need some phone cards because I’m trying to stay slippery forever.
Tracing my way between a empire and an island, an island and a continent of return. Floating forever because I’m 100% salt.
Shani Strand (b. 1995 in New York, NY/ raised in Teaneck, New Jersey) works with various materials to create objects and installations that fantasize about spaces known and unknown, but inevitable productions of cultural creolization. She plays with local vernacular and globalized language to explore the hybridity that appears in most cultures, but specifically out of post-colonial conditions.
Shani Strand, can i get a BOSS phone card please?, 2020
Video with sound
Various fabrics, rubber paint, canvas, graphite, india ink, latex paint, ballpoint pen
Liquid latex, leather shoe polish
Concreate, wire, fabric, beeswax, seashells, chicken bones, nails, epoxy
Concrete, mesh, clay, nails, cloves, epoxy, polyurethane
Concrete, mesh, wood, spray paint, tar, seashells, fabric, epoxy, sorrel, clay, dirt, found fibers