By Zaiche Johnson, Creative Catalyst
The proportion of oppressive mechanisms, only expand, when juxtaposed to the exhaustive weight, that’s applied by a structural power matrix. When Erin Kendrick’s neurons messaged this cumbersome pain to the spaces in her heart, an excursion was initiated, christening her vessel to sail for reconciliation on the seas of patriarchal exploitation.
Her own things is her specific, stylized war journalism, with it’s blood traces and archaeology for feminine identity affixed to Blackness. Diagonally braced for the violent pathology, operable as a subtle silencing, within chauvinist expectations. Accredited by each and every man who functions as a domesticator of Black womanist genius. Where and how the misplacement of her invaluable existential opals occured is woven into her brushed geometric narratives. Breathing like rare, broken seagulls, nursing their own health, through seismic songs as intimate as private tears, or as gargantuan as walking through alabaster academic halls, which bolsters a matrix, that never considered you in the world’s future.
Her own things, is a ritual, bound to the sacrificial calves mounted on a pyre in the sacred from of a Black girl. Accessing her matriarchal license, growing into a woman, through thorns that act as acupuncture, healing in matrimony with anguish. There are clinical modalities, which exist where I can give an exhibition synopsis. Branded in concise emotional fonts, so it can be read, then compartmentalized in the casual section of our perceptions. I reject that course, because Erin crafted this optic anthology with messy thumbs and flooded pupils. It needs to haunt our prearranged introspection. Ntozake and Bell were gorgeous banshees in Kemetic crowns, while Erin was their elaborate stenographer.
I wept the other day when I was in solitude with her exhibit. I watched radiant, young Black women embrace and sob, so vulnerable that I walked away in order to interrogate my own understanding of the feminine condition. I peered at eye level, with majestic little girls, in jovial shock, because the paintings looked just like them. Not, in the sphere of White Capitalist art fantasy, creating sellable Black dolls, but as an organism painted by their Auntie or their Mama.
I swear on my bones, that this body of work could have easily kept the electricity lit in a sudden power outrage. I heard older Queens testify that a younger one didn’t forget their historical agony. Commodity constructs are often framed around art, to circumnavigate the visceral reckoning of our ugly complicity. I won’t let the peripheral observer subconsciously buy off their restitution and stroll away to brunch. This world made Erin Kendrick scramble and labor in the mire, for her inalienable right to a dignified identity. Therefore, this world must claw through the muck of it’s own design to find it’s discarded humanity. This mercurial exhibit was a preliminary map!