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Arts + Literature Laboratory: ALL Prize Artist Talk with Rita Benissan and Conley Clark
April 1, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Please join us for a live, interactive artist talk and Q&A with 2021 ALL Prize-winning artists Rita Mawuena Benissan and Conley Clark about their exhibitions Rita Mawuena Benissan: Mo Apiafo and Conley Clark: (Sub)urbia, which will be on view at ALL from March 11 through May 1, 2021.
Rita Mawuena Benissan: Mo Apiafo is a photography and installation based exhibition that explores aspects of the artist’s Ghanian-American background. Using narrative photography, Benissan utilizes imagery taken in Ghana to reinterpret the royal umbrella, a symbol of hierarchy of chieftancy in the country. The umbrellas are used to protect and shade the King, Chiefs, and Queenmothers. Benissan contradicts the monarchy and colonialist ideology that they stand for by using what she terms her “Black Aesthetic.” Benissan stages her umbrellas alongside images of everyday working people, reclaiming the power associated with the symbol.
Conley Clark: Home Sweet Home is a is a multimedia, installation-based exhibition that draws upon the artist’s personal experiences to question the unspoken suppositions and expectations of gender-conformity within a society. Considering its underlying tensions and fraught history, Clark combines plaster casts, AstroTurf, video, sound, and various found objects to embellish the landscape of the suburbs with queerly-coded visuals. In this way, prevalent imaginaries of stereotypical suburban life are disrupted by an uncanny representation of the same thing.
Images in header courtesy of Rita Benissan and Conley Clark.
