RANDOM

NOTES FROM DIAPHANOUS

NOTES FROM DIAPHANOUS

Notes from Diaphanous is a collection of behind-the-scenes material culture and prototypes from the Diaphanous project. This exhibition at the Colored Girls Museum, running until Spring 2025, is part of the museum’s Intermission exhibition and features a motion-responsive installation, AR canvases, and detailed plans for the project. For this iteration of the exhibition, we will be focusing on soft spaces, channeling Sankofa through archival images, imagined photographs, and textile art that emphasize protection and preservation. Underpinned by the philosophy of Sankofa as a means to imagine the future, this exhibition is a blend of old and new technologies and protective practices.

Exhibiting at The Colored Girls Museum, Philadelphia, up until Spring 2025


ON HER MIND

ON HER MIND

For @blinkcincinnati We did a project mapped project on an existing mural. The mural features a little girl. We thought a lot about this little girl. Who is she? what is she thinking? Where is she now? She seemed watched but unseen. We focused on all those questions and decided to do a piece that was inspired by the possibilities for her and her community along with visual nods to tattooing (referring the RIP section of the mural). Lucky for us, we’ve got a tattoo artist in The collective so it was easy to draw from visual inspiration in that genre. On her mind is a soundtrack and visual journey that references ancestors present, parallel dimensions and all the things that can randomly pop into one’s head about future play and possibilities.

Here’s some project context:
Okay, so last minute we were added to the Blink roster to work with this unique mural. It’s actually multiple murals in one mural. The first layer says RIP RAPES and honors graffiti and tattoo legend Jason Brunson, aka Rapes One, son of prominent tattoo studio, Designs By Dana, founders Dana and Dot Brunson. We did not name this person so don’t ask… In 2017 Blink commissioned Lithuanian-born, Malaysian resident Ernest Zacharevic to create this mural, which is a portrait of a young girl living in the building (name unknown).

LIMITED EDITION PRINTS

To celebrate our Blink projection project ‘On Her Mind’ we teamed up with @diyprinting and @feigntofheart and have released 2 limited edition prints


GEE'S BEND

THE FULL SET

GEE’S BEND EDITION

The crew along with the Full Set (and her new quilt inspired nails) set out on a road trip last week to the incredible Gee’s Bend for the Airing of the Quilts Festival. It was all things color, fun, historic and magic. The stand out is the lessons in cooperative movement, the power of women and the glory of creative expression.

We sit on the shoulders of many.
Thank you @visitgeesbend for having us. Thank you @kendrasteppdavis and @toughdumplin for being down for adventures. Thank you @urbanarchivist and @museumofblackjoy for being a visionary.


THE RIDE OUT

The Ride Out Project is a Mural and Mini Documentary project that explores and celebrates ride culture. The project focuses on motorbikes/ATVs, horseback riding, and bicycle riding as a community form and legacy in Philadelphia, particularly for the Philadelphia Black and Brown communities. This project elevates and honors these forms of community gathering and their multigenerational intersectionality. This project was done in collaboration with Murals Arts Philadelphia

Join us Saturday, June 29th 2024 for a screening and neighborhood party to celebrate the completion of this project. 1719 68th Ave Philadelphia PA 19126.


ILE OMI

Ile Omi: House of Water is a projection-mapped installation. It is inspired by intersectional African Diasporic culture, West African culture, and chronophysics, the field of physics that specifically deals with the concept of time and time travel. It showcases a thriving underwater community throughout various times. The imagined people are the descendants of the African souls lost during transatlantic slave voyages. The installation transports visitors to a futuristic world where these descendants have adapted to an underwater lifestyle and formed a thriving, communal society.

The projection mapping technology creates an immersive underwater environment filled with vibrant colors, textures, and sounds. The work contains a blend of iconography and images inspired by various traditional West African religions and Yoruba customs and imaginings of what a future derived from this experience would look, sound, and feel like. Visitors are invited to explore this underwater world and to witness the community’s rich cultural traditions, innovative technologies, and harmonious relationships with the surrounding marine ecosystem.

The project uses a combination of archival photography and AI-generated photographs, combined with a custom score to create an alternate reality where visitors can explore alternative histories and futures that were previously deemed impossible.

By presenting this alternate reality, the installation invites visitors to re-imagine the potential of humanity and to question the limitations imposed by history and circumstance.

Ile Omi is part of the Diaphanous series – An immersive collection of art, telling our stories and guiding guests through a whimsical, imaginative collection of experiences and material objects. This collection blends art, technology, and history to re-imagine and re-tell stories of the African Diaspora that have been excluded or marginalized due to racial and gender biases. Each offering embodies a theme of something or someone that could only exist now but re-framed as if it did exist in a prior time, space, or dimension.

additional support provided by Tough Dumplin, Garey Kennebrew and Shea Zephir

Thank you to our exhibition sponsors: Blink Cincinnati and Epson America

Thank you to our PAR-Projects and the season sponsors: ArtsWave, Ohio Arts Council, and Northside Bank & Trust Company.


GOING PLACES + DIY PRINTING

DIY PRINTING + MZ.ICAR Going Places

An Exhibition and Printing Play Date with DIY Printing Studio and The Mz. Icar Collective.

Where:
DIY Printing, 2511 Essex Place Studio #188 Cincinnati, OH 45206

When: on display til June 19th, 2024

These limited edition color screen prints are available here.

This is part of our new Diaphanous Series
The collective has been thematically working on envisioning best-case scenarios, visual pieces, and symbols that imagine the paths to get to those ideal scenarios. These collage pieces feature images from our archives. AI-generated images and illustrated pieces. Through this series of work, we are playing with new technologies, studying traditional West African spirituality along with diasporic ancestry, and using this to frame future paths.

We are thinking about how do we incorporate history, tradition, and technology as tools that help tell stories that inspire. Sometimes we just need to see ourselves in glorious alternative ways.

This collection of work envisions progress, movement, internal or external but mostly focuses on imagining how we get to our ideal scenarios.


KEEP GOING

KEEP GOING

‘Keep Going’
Our latest antics @arteloksq

“Keep Going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”
-Harriet Tubman.

This location specific piece is located in an incredible motel project called @arteloksq located in Kennett Square.

201 Birch St, Kennett Square, PA 19348In the 19th century, the borough played an instrumental role in the Underground Railroad and we decided to uplift this story and pay homage to Harriet Tubman…and encourage everyone to keep going!

Huge thanks to @squarerootscollective


LET'S PLAY

LET'S PLAY

Let’s Play is a celebration of this gathering space at the Shipyard in Green Bay. It features the branding colors and font in a geometric arrangement, as well as some of the endangered species in the area, including the gray wolf and whooping crane, and white-tailed deer. The patterns in the design are inspired by the Menominee people and serve as an acknowledgment of the land in which the space exists.


MZ & DORITOS

MZ & DORITOS

We are in full swing of mural season and have barely had a moment in the studio. All the wonderful projects are blooming including this one. In route to another project we had to pop by our studio to pick up this beautiful press release package of our partnership with Doritos. We couldn’t be more thrilled to help celebrate this year’s change-makers and elevate all of the cool work they’re doing and celebrate it with this beautiful packaging. The artwork’s theme is all about Thriving!

This limited edition bag is available nationwide at Walmart. While we were on the road, we noticed it hadn’t hit stores in Green Bay or Milwaukee, but we’re getting messages from across the nation of folks picking up this bag in local stores. Grab a few if you can.

Here’s a link to the project!


HEAVY DISTORTION

HEAVY DISTORTION

We were the proud recipients of the black music city Grant and for this project we decided to do an augmented reality piece celebrating sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Heavy Distortion is an augmented reality project celebrating the influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She is most known for a technique called heavy distortion. This piece aims to immerse the experiencer in heavy distortion.

Huge thanks to
#BlackMusicCityGrant @wxpnfm  @recphilly
#sisterrosettatharpe

AR USER EXPERIENCE INSTRUCTIONS

Heavy Distortion V1

The first one is image responsive. Meaning that if you download the @Artivive app on a mobile device and show it the image marker and it will activate the Augmented reality.

Heavy Distortion V2

This one is activated by a link or QR code.