Artist, Kahlil Robert Irving: My name is Kahlil Robert Irving. You're standing in my installation of large-scale wallpaper imagery contextualizing ceramic sculptures. The works traverse the digital landscape, the metaphorical landscape, and contemporary issues affecting many different communities, but the specific experiences that I'm referring to in my work range from my time living in St. Louis, Missouri, and New York City.
One of my earliest memories is with my mother in our old Cadillac car, driving and listening to the radio. And with my father, I remember on the weekends cleaning with the windows open, with incense burning, and music playing through the radio. Those experiences of hearing that music creates the architecture in my mind of how I construct these collages. They’re mirroring the expansiveness of the internet and the capabilities by which one can engage so much diverse material simultaneously.
The wallpaper is anchored in relationship to ceramic sculptures that look like fossilized objects of contemporary life, that also have reflected images on the surfaces of them. And the relationship between these images on the wall and the images wrapped on the sculptures is a kind of capture of the digital space and a physical three-dimensional collage.
As you walk through the exhibition, I hope you take away a few ideas: that all Black lives matter, and that we need to defund the police and create different infrastructures within this problematic environment, which we live in, called the United States of America. And if you are a Black viewer in this exhibition, I hope you find space for joy, memorial, and meaning for our existence in this complex, contemporary, colonial environment in which we're living.