A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing Katherine Simóne Reynolds

In her first solo exhibition in Chicago, Graham Foundation Fellow, Katherine Simóne Reynolds continues her exploration of overhealing from trauma in a new body of work that includes photographs, a two-channel film, sculptures, and other works. Referencing the creation of a keloid—a raised scar-like skin growth that continues to grow beyond the original site of a wound—as an outward representation of healing and a site sensitive to recovery and repair in tandem, Reynolds looks at the Rust Belt as a kind of keloidal landscape. Centered on Cairo and Brooklyn, Illinois—also known as Lovejoy, the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States in 1873—the exhibition addresses relationships between perceptions of abandonment and fertility, Black female imagination, and different manifestations of healing.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Her work physicalizes emotions and experiences by constructing pieces that include portrait photography, video works, choreography, sculpture, and installation. Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour and beauty while interrogating the notion of “authentic care.” Her practice generally deals in Blackness from her own perspective, and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work.”

Reynolds has exhibited and performed at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY, among other spaces. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at SculptureCenter; Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City; and Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.

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