A Quiet Impression
Opening: Thursday, Aug 5, 2021 6 – 7 pmThursday, Aug 5 – Sep 24, 2021
Jazmine Harris’s solo presentation, A Quiet Impression, organized by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal explores reflection, interiority, slowness, stillness, memory, the mundane, and the unknown during her time in quarantine, and after.
Harris mines her own archive of personal experiences and reflections, through a series of photographed scrapbook pages composed of hand written notes, found images, periodical and found text material, and family photographs that articulate a layered, but quiet approach to processing our personal relationship to current events, embodied knowledge, kinship, care, and self determination - that these associations are indeed interconnected.
Harris encourages us to think about our most urgent dreams, slowness as desirable and necessary, and reimagining what’s already familiar to us, working from within. Building from within, with respect to aliveness and collective memory, the work enables a nuanced understanding of the Black mundane and interior livelihood. The act of envisioning through fragmentation to create a series of past, present, and future images is a reverberating and generous offer from Harris.
“...when I heard the New York Times Daily Podcast in a coverage of the Breonna Taylor story, I thought, "When not a better way to connect with this woman who I saw so much of myself in, and to also embrace the power of scrapbooking, not just as this catchy or cheesy thing that maybe they do out in the suburbs, but as a way to think about my past, think about my present, and to really shape my own story and my own narrative for myself " , Harris explains here.
This presentation includes new work from Harris, alongside audio voice notes and a commissioned playlist created by artist and cultural worker Janelle Ayana Miller.
“This playlist is influenced by quiet stirring. The songs are a collection of internal reflection and external conversations…”
- Janelle Ayana Miller.
Jazmine Harris deconstructs personal, communal, and political narratives through photography, video, and text, Memory, both found and fabricated, serves as her primary material; the acts of remembrance inform and shape the processes she employs. As she addresses the beauty and failure of collective memory, Jazmine. seeks to mine, archive, and reimagine impressions left on the personal as one navigates the everyday familiar and unknown.
Jazmine. holds a BS from Florida A&M University, an MFA from The University of Chicago and is currently a 2021 Writing Fellow for A Public Space.
Janelle Ayana. Miller is a grandchild of the great migration, a midwesterner with southern inflection based in Chicago. . Her practice is rooted within familial and communal aesthetics, looking deeply into bridging self and time as an act of place making