Memory is one of my central concerns. Which "memories" do we recall? How were they embedded? What are their social and political repercussions? Have they been contested? Can they be modified?

These questions run a thread through all of my work.

The portrait series', African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth (2003-5) and Agua Dulce (2006)* were both aimed at highlighting the fact that the majority of the "enslaved" Africans transported to the Americas were situated in Latin America and the Caribbean. In creating these works I wanted to shift the narrative away from a focus on the familiar Black US American experience as an effort to be more inclusive of other subjectivities pertaining to the transatlantic slave trade.

Portrait of the New Guard on the other hand looks forward towards the "new" South Africa (2007). It turns its back on apartheid, not to pretend it didn't exist but, rather, to celebrate the new generation of "born frees" who are shaping their own realities unburdened by first hand experience with the demons of the past.

Commuter Vans and No Man's land (2008), created in Nairobi, Kenya, is a portrait series on matatu (commuter van) operators working in an around the city center. I call them "coyotes" after the term used for the guides who help smuggle South American immigrants across the border. I use this metaphor because on board a matatu one finds themselves in a sort of no mans land where cultural, political, and national borders dissolve. This work is meant to question the relevance of national borders in cosmopolitan cities like Nairobi.

From there the exhibition jumps to my more recent works from Poverty Pornography and Archival Impulse created in 2011 and 2012. These works mark a significant transition in my practice from more traditional analog portraiture to conceptual digital photo montage/performance.

"Death" and "Diorama" are the outcome of my quest to identify photographic cliché's of the black body that were created during the period of photographic history that was underscored by the goals colonial expansion in Africa as well as enslavement in the Americas.

Having spent much of my early career attempting to dispel stereotypes and find new narratives, I began to ask myself why I felt it was a necessary task. It was in this introspection that I was reminded of a phrase in Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag where she says:

"It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked ..."

This was the conceptual starting point for these recent works. As a result, new questions arose around the black body (or more specifically black suffering) as spectacle. To address this I decided to recreate/reappropriate iconic images from the 19th and early 20th century. I chose to use my own body in this work because I wanted to not only be transparent about my own relationship to these images, but also to avoid attaching yet another body to these problematic perspectives.

At the same time, conceptually, I wanted to use the nude female form as a metaphor for violence and recreate the tension of seduction and repulsion that my reference images evoke.

It is with this in mind that Distant Selves offers two categories of my own memories. Those I feel I have been given and those I wish to install.
- Ayana V. Jackson

* Produced in collaboration with writer Marco Villalobos

** image (left)
© 2013-2014 Ayana Vellissia Jackson
Images courtesy of Gallery MOMO