Exhibition dates: November 4 – 17, 2017                               

Opening reception: Saturday, November 4, 6-9 pm; Performance by Kandis Williams: 7 pm

USC Alum Mixer Friday, November 17, 5-6  pm; Closing event, 6 – 9 pm

Navel Gallery

1611 South Hope Street, 2nd floor

Los Angeles, CA 90015

Exhibition hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 5-8 pm and by appointment

Comprising exclusively female identified artists of color, Between Nothingness and Infinity presents work that addresses structurally intersectional forms of discrimination. This multidisciplinary exhibition aims to rebut the mainstream marginalization of women of color and how their experiences have been systematically written out of the notion of being through works ranging from installation, sculpture, and video by Kelly Akashi, Micha Cárdenas, Neha Choksi, Maya Gurantz, Michèle Magema, Yong Soon Min, Jasmine Murrell, Gala Porras-Kim, Kandis Williams, Dalida María Benfield, and Amy Yao.  From Michèle Magema’s poetically mythological video, to Jasmine Murrell’s evocative womb-like installation, to Kandis Williams’ performance of the fetishizing gaze in digital spaces, each of the artworks elicits a phenomenological engagement with the viewer while examining the interlocking social identities of the artist. Instances of anti-racist, (neo)colonial, and feminist efforts are central to the narrative of this exhibition through the empowerment of critical social agents.

I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple. Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.                           

                                             - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1986

The exhibition’s title Between Nothingness and Infinity derives from Fanon’s seminal text Black Skin, White Masks, where nothingness is positioned as the historically configured dilemma of raced bodies, both objectively and theoretically. The position of nothingness, as considered by Fred Moten, is often correlated with the pursuit of new means of existence through reconfigured subjectivities. For women of color, this entails an effort to reclaim the subject-hood and equivalent recognition that colonial epistemologies have continually denied.

Between Nothingness and Infinity is curated by April Baca and Allison Littrell, 2018 MA Candidates in the Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. An accompanying exhibition publication will be made available to the public following the conclusion of the exhibition. Please sign up for our mailing list to keep up to date with information regarding this text.

For more information, please contact:

April Baca and Allison Littrell at: aprilbac@usc.edu and lmalliso@usc.edu