Kelly Taylor Mitchell Artist Talk, 2020/2021 Working Artist Project
Channel: Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
Date: 2022-01-05

Artist Talk at MOCA GA held on January 4, 2022  in conjunction with the 2020/2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project. Kelly Taylor Mitchell 2020/21 WAP fellow created work for her solo exhibition entitled: Reunion. Exhibition dates: November 6, 2021 - January 8, 2022

About the Exhibition

“Brown is my favorite color. It is the color of my skin, the clay of the earth, the shell of the peanut. I inherited this deep appreciation, just as I inherited a connection to The Great Dismal Swamp and its Black and Indigenous forbearers who crafted a legacy of making a way out of no way.

My beliefs are a reflection of the experiences and people that have crossed my path, in earthly and intangible ways. My use of labor-intensive handwork, ritual ceremony, and speculative histories are expressions of memory.

The ways in which I remember are sensorial. A reunion conjures the smell of wet grass after a summer sun shower, the incomparable comfort and anguish of southern heat, the sickly sweet taste of that iced tea. Reunion can transcend the outdoor gathering that awaits after a lengthy drive down I-95, endless hands of  “long game,” and first encounters with cousins, great aunts and uncles who are as unfamiliar as they are known.

A reunion is a collision. A collision of interconnected people, places, and practices; the same way that Diasporic practices of ancestor worship are as legible as long-distance phone calls with kin.

In Reunion familial lore serves as a set of bountiful seedlings for recollections that stretch their roots beyond first-hand experience, fostering spiritual technology and new mythologies. My work occupies the threshold between the real and imagined, a type of portal described best by Sethe:”

You be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.     Toni Morrison, Beloved, pg. 18

–Kelly Taylor Mitchell