the space I am in: ORACLES

Alisha B. Wormsley

June 7 - July 20, 2019 

Ashara Ekundayo Gallery is honored to exhibit Alisha B Wormsley’s “the space I am in: ORACLES” in conjunction with our Omi Arts Summer Studios Residency project.

When existence is [in]formed by death one must conjure out of form to survive. This is the craft of spirituality inspired by the SIBYLS (then and now and soon). This work is a dialogue between black woman and environment. The specifics of the environment are insignificant. Informed by collapse and time.

To survive, one must know space.

I dream about black women.

How we are constantly informed by our nature. This nature encourages an understanding out of form. This form comes from the void to help us remember.

So. What is “erasure” and what is a “conjuring” – and how might those lines overlap?

How attached can we be in these interspaces? Even the space of body. There is repetition, returning again and again to a place to (re)build. What conjuring is used? What story is told? Not just to survive but strive.

These are the ORACLES.

OPENING NITE RECEPTION + ARTIST TALK
Alisha B Wormsley and Ashara Ekundayo in conversation
with special guest Ingrid LaFleur
6:00 - 9:00 PM
Artist Talk at 730p

TAROT, Art & High Tea
Saturday, June 8th
2:00 - 4:00 pm
COST: You can bring libations, fruit, a secret, a stone, money, a drawing, a song, but bring something!

"Children of NAN"
Film Screening + Q & A w/ Alisha Wormsley & Ellen Sebatian Chang
Friday | July 12th
7:30 - 9:30 PM
Admission $10 - GET TIX HERE!

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color. Wormsley is an artist who has worked in communities around the world, helping to develop artistic ideas and celebrate identities, and has organized public art initiatives for national and international audiences. Wormsley’s work has been honored and supported with a number of awards and grants to support programs: The People Are The Light ( part of the Hillman Photography Initiative), afronaut(a) film and performance series, Homewood Artist Residency (recently received the mayor’s public art award), the Children of NAN film series and archive, There Are Black People in the Future body of work. These projects and works have exhibited widely. Namely, the Andy Warhol Museum, Octavia Butler conference at Spelman University, Carnegie Museum of Art, Johannesburg SA, Studio XX in Montreal, Project Row House, the Houston Art League, Rush Art gallery in NY, the Charles Wright museum in Detroit and most recently the Mattress Factory.  Currently working on: a public park design around community and sustainable water, a temporary installation in Pittsburgh's Market square, and creating a public program to put her text "There Are Black People In the Future" in residence to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College. in 2019 was awarded the Presidential Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University where she will spend the next two years researching and creating work around the resurgence of matriarchal energy (defined as witchcraft by white supremacy) in the African American community.