Steffani Jemison

Specially commissioned for Jemison's first exhibition space De Appel (Amsterdam), these drawings on clear film stand as a continuation of Jemison’s interest in characters and markings from slave narratives, constructed languages, outsider artists, alternative alphabets, and utopian fiction. These works propose opacity as a political strategy and intentional obscurity as a way of re-claiming subjectivity and power. While spare and simple on the surface, each work corresponds to complex personal and social histories in which whole new forms of language were invented as a means of survival.