As I walk along the shores of the Pacific, I carry with me past and present. I am awakened by the wind, the cool air on my skin, and the vast expanse of silver and blue. Peering toward the horizon, my mind drifts between edges of identity. Memories, troubles, hopes, and dreams are witnessed and refreshed from a living gaze. I listen to the waves consume and release, back and forth, as my heart expands to meet the melody. My lungs, chest, and arms lighten, and I breathe into my own unknowing. Where do I end, where do I begin?
In her inaugural solo exhibition, Eugene’s Cove, Lishan AZ combines film, photography, and text for an imaginative portal where Black Life is aquatic. Merging speculative-fiction and African mythologies, AZ imagines an underwater society where victims of racial and state violence adaptively survive below sea. Flowy, brown-skinned figures draped in colored fabrics float through fluid blue-green water. They appear regal, joyful, soft, and dignified. Like a breath, traveling from the seashore, through gallery walls, and eventually back to the shore. Where does the artwork end? Where does it begin?
During a recent phone call with the artist, AZ mentioned that making this series felt like “being immersed in community.” Playful stories about her practice, spanning several years of swimming underwater with her subjects, are made evident through these intimate portraits of beauty and connection.
Perhaps in AZ’s case, the artwork begins over the pandemic, when people all over the world were staying-at-home or fleeing to their safest possible refuge. AZ, who was living in California at the time, felt called to the Midwest. This call came from friends, collaborators, and an undefinable nudge to create an artwork she had yet to fully realize. Before she had the idea for this multimedia series, AZ spent her mornings swimming in Lake Michigan, where she eventually started experimenting with an underwater camera. She intentionally swam near what her friends referred to as “the Black Beach,” and after months of making this site an extension of her practice, an organic friendship formed with the local swimmers. The kids, she elaborated in our conversation, were bold participants in her project and directed her to take their portraits. “Watch me do this!” They’d shout as they’d pose underwater for their new friend. It was after AZ developed her first roll of film, a black and white collection depicting Black joy and childhood, that she knew she had something special.
Or, perhaps, the artwork begins just after her first roll of film, when AZ learned the story of Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old boy who was killed in 1919 for “floating across the color line.” Eugene and three friends were playing on the Black side of the beach, much like the kids AZ had befriended, when he accidentally floated across the segregated lines and was fatally attacked by white gang members. Learning about his story amidst a visceral connection to the atmosphere where this tragedy took place, AZ felt inspired to imagine a speculative realm where Eugene radically survived and continued breathing underwater.
Inhaling and exhaling becomes a process of rhythmic renewal, much like the giving and receiving of a creative process. Holistic Chinese medicine teaches us that the sensation of grief is stored in the lungs, and that breathing is how we can heal the emotional wound. Artist Annie Albagli also brings our attention to breath as a poetic tool for breaking old systems through sound and prayer. Ritually blown at the beginning of a new year, the shofar sound serves as a cosmic relationship between the creator and the creation. Using the breath to blow from the ancient instrument, the holder demonstrates a transformative communion with all that is. “The air,” she recites, is both “what contains us,” and “what is contained in us.”
Moving my way through the dimly lit gallery hosting AZ’s photographs, the room is silent, yet conversations with the artist echo in my memory. “Listening to images,” as scholar Tina Campt would advise has become a sensitive tool to navigate complicated histories with the contemporary moment. Amidst the hazy figures draped in flowy fabrics, the most resonant detail of the photographs is the golden shimmering light gleaming through the water. Warming these subjects and beaming through the liquid surface, I can feel the sensation of the sun shining through the frame. I can hear the children laughing and local friends splashing from all angles. I can imagine the participants taking deep inhales, before making their way down for the perfect shot. I imagine how these photographs may also serve as archival images, documenting a fleeting moment in time and place.
So, I ask, where does an artwork end, where does it begin? Does it live in a frame, a phone call, gallery walls, or in the artist’s intuition? Can it call the artist through sites of production and motivate stories daring to be told? Can it transmute unprocessed emotions, rising and falling, again and again, like the waves of an ocean? Does it live through the lungs of the musician, ears of the listener, pages of the writer, and the spaces-in-between? As someone deeply interested in the poetics of a creative process, I wonder if the artwork, like the breath, is simply a call and response between the physical body and infinity.
Citations
1 This series is exhibited in the back left corner of the gallery, providing an intimate nook that grounds viewers in the reality of the artist’s communal process.
2 Traditionally blown using the horn of a ram during Rosh Hashanah.
3 We Become [Vessels], Annie Albagli, 2023.
4 Campt uses to the term “listening” broadly to include various sensations that expand our understanding of an archival image. Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
Author
