Neeyah Muhammad

In my practice, I follow a conceptual frame work that allows me to dissect my raced and gendered experiences and beget them in a painting or sculpture. This divides my work into two strains that solve two visual problems. Giving form to my experiences in a concise visual lexicon is my first problem. The second is presenting the weight that comes with these experiences through pigment, circuits, found objects, and fabric in a way that makes the viewer aware of their body.

In both strains I present pigments as a site of a shared memory, interiority or introspection and attempt to re-contextualize color-scapes so that they can contain multiple histories and narratives. In the second strain I explore how these pigments become not only resistance when connected to a working circuit, but also inactive texts of multiple histories.

In America blackness invokes a societal weight. It comes in the form of the generational trauma from being a black, broke (but not broken), woman from the south side of Chicago. It can also come in the form of walking into Urban Outfitters and being followed around by the security. The weight grows when the store clerk asks me whether or not I need help for the 5th time or ignoring me when I do. Societal weight and trauma is surveillance, and it reminds me of the panopticon. All of these experiences, have mass and energy that I use to charge oil pigments.

As a black woman, I am hyper-visible, invisible, or both at the same time. In that moment, I resist the objectivity imposed on my body. My paintings are also an attempt to imbue these characteristics into a visual language. In my work I attempt to make an object hypervisible yet invisible. The banner is seemingly just a piece of semi transparent silk chiffon fabric in normal light. The banner is painted with semi translucent oil paint that can only be fully revealed with a flashlight. The painting is invisible in normal light, hypervisible when a flashlight is shining on it, and both at the same time because you can never see the painting all at once. The banner becomes an object that resists its objectivity yet embraces its materiality.

Many of my paintings are portraits of these experiences or become interfaces that separate you from these experiences. Some interfaces stand in between the knowable and unknowable, the hyper visible and invisible. My painting titled This is my right to time and space (2016) is an example of an inactive interface that can only be activated through death. Since it is meant to be left inactive, the viewer is left to contend with why it is important the artist made a right to time and space physical and why is this right in my death.

I ultimately wish to give form to what is traumatic, unbearable, unthinkable and the idea of being regarded as an object or non person by re-contextualizing found objects, fabrics paintings and sculpture in a way that calls attention to my body and experience without representing myself. In the other strain I am to represent myself and others as a site of introspection using pigment as a site of multiple histories. In my embodiment, my works become epistemological artifacts of the terrifying quotidian.

I am excited to have the opportunity to continue solving these visual problems in a highly conceptual environment like the Yale Norfolk residency and I hope to contribute to the discourse as well as learn how others solve their visual problems.

Check out my Vimeo https://vimeo.com/neeyah