“Ms Coote great grand picky… nobody a trouble you…” 2024: an installation piece in a room bathed in blue light while muffled audio of a Spiritual Baptist choir plays. A wall is painted black and overlaid with a ghostly apparition of Udemezue’s family’s countryside house in Bickerseth, Jamaica. A constellation of family photos hovers above the house with notes and diary entires. An assemblage of foliage and rocks is placed in the foreground with notes on research about Afro-Caribbean spirituality.
images: Ryan Lee gallery
“I need to know that you will be here where he can’t find us when I knock my key” 2021 is an installation piece is set up in a room painted in black. Mixed materials such as wood branches, soil, flowers, leaves, and rope are laid on clear plastic sheets, lit with a blue light. At the center of the installation are family photos printed and pasted on paper. A soundscape is played next to the installation. Udemezue draws from the story of Victoria Montou, a Haitian Revolutionary fighter in the army of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to whom she was also a surrogate mother. In his recent work, Udemezue incorporates the “undercommons” of his own Jamaican roots––to borrow Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s term for self-organization––by recreating familial ritual.
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“where the ashes of our libraries settled beside the guinep peels” 2020 is a fragment of a larger installation I have drafted up to pull together all the tools I’m using to build my resin works. Not just labor tools but everything from the family photo book to the containers of Florida water are symbols of what I’m bringing with me into this space of production/ recovery. The small installation is reflective of my artist work space, spiritual work space and alters my mother used to make in our house when I was a child. Watching my mom decorate alters at our home with florals, vases of fresh water to be blessed and Florida water were gems that I have taken into my adulthood. I realize they have come to be reflections of the necessity to harness joy within the lives of black children, protection and extending grace/ empathy. Empathy within our nuclear family and the larger diaspora. My spiritual journey was filled with “tools stations” like these alters. As complicated as my relationship was to her and the church as a child, it was reassuring to know that I had something around me to keep me safe in a very unsafe world.
“Alter” 2019 is a performance with artist Christopher Udemezue and his mother, Angelyn McQueen. In the space McQueen and Udemezue collaborated to build an alter and installation. The alter was a kin to alters McQueen had made in the past of Udemezue’s childhood. McQueen then lead a candle lighting ceremony and special prayer touching upon the concepts of intergenerational trauma, healing, spiritual practice as a form of security and roots.
”A scared, essentially orphaned little girl in Bickersteth, Jamaica and closeted lil boy running from bullies in Long Island, New York - who would have known we’d find each other here.” - Udemezue