Artist Statement
Ricky Weaver’s work co-conspires with the poetics and temporality of Black feminist metaphysics embeded in the Black Quotidian. These images locate a code that can be traced back to the Middle Passage—one that disrupts the paradigmatic ways of archiving Blackness and outsmarts surveillance technologies as such. Her application of scripture, hymn, and colloquial passages come together in acts of dark sousveillance to recall language that implies worlds that don’t require an escape. She addresses the sonic, linguistic, and visual as a way to posture the body as a central apparatus for storing, downloading, and transferring archives.
Ricky’s work is situated within an object-oriented practice that theorizes image beyond the photograph. All objects point to images as our minds compute an internal representation of how we believe the object to exist. The photographic object is no different in this way, as it is a vessel or repository for all the other images that it points to. Weaver calls this the Meta-Archive: A self-referential index of information, categorized by perceptual filters, sitting in front of and behind an object, governing the ways in which we produce, experience, and embody material culture. The photograph slips away from an object is in its relationship to time. Ricky leverages this temporal window to signal specific archives, not unlike the mechanics of a negro spiritual, not unlike epigentics, not unlike quantum entanglement. “if you know, you know.”
Ricky’s current work investigates the indexical relationship objects have to images as a way of contemplating the potential fugitive materiality of the photograph and the body. This work is part of an ongoing interrogation of the relationship between content, vessel, and getting gone. In terms of semantics and recognition, the body and the photograph both suffer from and for the form; the spirit is what escapes that. Ricky is working through Ritual as a modality of creation or attunement as a way to liberate us from the form and bring forth new information from the aesthetic plane.