A Meditation on the Untitled

Kennedi Carter draws from her ancestral canon of Black and Southern experiences through skin, texture, intimacy, home, and community. A MEDITATION ON THE UNTITLED is Kennedi Carter’s Big Bang - a precipice conjured by notions of creativity and self-reflection. Carter creates her own cosmology in the realm of Blackness, bolstered by a reverence for self and identity. She lures audiences into a universe of her own making - that which is queer, that which is other, that which is woman, that which is too often colonized, but that which, by her artistry and intention, is permitted to let down any and all guards.

As a Durham, North Carolina native (by way of Texas and Virginia), Kennedi Carter’s primary passion is that of depicting Black life in the South. A MEDITATION ON THE UNTITLED is a visual compilation of her passion coupled with love as praxis.  As her own father, philosopher and theologian J. Kameron Carter once said, this  practiced love is “an air pocket to breathe.” Always her father and often her conspirator as in (Untitled), Self-Portrait where he assists in  shaving her head, his imparted wisdom took clear effect. Now through self-reflection, costuming, and shadow work, Kennedi Carter’s enchanted subjects transcend performance and invite us as witnesses to a truthful comfortability. The citizens within her enclave are presented in formal compositions while simultaneously epitomizing a welcoming vulnerability.

It should be a requisite of impactful art, that the artist balances conflicting gestures so as to sustain repeated viewings. In this sense, Carter takes from the margins and reintroduces it as a new wholeness, or, at least, a recognizable redefining of Blackness as image.  All are invited to bear witness to the new world this work creates, undeniably a land where Black life and Black stories live comfortably and abundantly, rejecting eroticization and othering, in ways that need not be explained. While art is, by definition, a game of representation, where color and light are extracted, audiences shall be justly awed as they reel in the vibrant authenticity of Kennedi Carter’s universe.