The Black Interior by Destiny Kearney

Proposal: 

Originally for this project, I wanted to focus on representing Blackness in relation to the physical. I wanted to highlight Black Skin, Black Hair, and the Black body in my project. As the semester comes to a close, I altered my motive slightly and decided to create a response piece to my class Black Heat, Black Cool: Theorizing Blackness, but specifically I wanted to respond to a book we read in a class titled The Sovereignty of Quiet, by Kevin Quashie. Quashie pushes readers to look past theorizing Blackness through the lens of resistance that is public, loud, and dramatic. He encourages readers to analyze the Black experience through the interior, or what he calls quiet. Quiet highlights “one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.” (6). This speaks about the “full range of one’s inner life” that is absent from race/racism but focuses on the essence of their being. So I titled my piece the Black Interior. 

In this project, I aim to highlight interiority through photographs. I want to capture the essence of my Blackness by examining my interior. Mentioned In the quote above, I’d like to highlight desire, ambition, fragility, vulnerability, and spirituality as my guiding themes to support “the interior.” I plan to achieve this by using a combination of people and objects as subject matter. I would like to play around with “black objects”, meaning things I would associate with my culture and/or society would and contrast them with a composed image that I put together. I can’t see the final product at the moment, but I look forward to seeing my ideas play out into bringing the interior into the light. 

This project is important to me because as I think about that course alongside this one along with our current situation, I think about how my art can speak volumes through this time. Being stuck at home reminds me of a lot of the concept of interiority because we are forced to deal with our inner lives at home, but also in our heads. I’d like to use this theme as a way to reflect on the pandemic not directly but focus on my growth as an academic and as an artist by combining the two as I shed light on the current circumstance. 

Timeline: 

4/29:  Buy Props needed for photos

4/30: Start shooting object shots 

5/1: Shots Featuring Myself

5/2: Family Shots 

5/3: Go through photos and select top images +Photoshop / Edit anything that needs work 

5/4: Design Photo book

5/5: Revise label for final and finalize photobook and place order! 

5/6 : DONE!