Tiona Nekkia McClodden: MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY

(Hardback)

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"An artist who may be America's most essential today." - The New York Times Known for her poignant examinations of biomythography and identity, McClodden uses a research-based approach in her practice as an artist and self-described "historian and cultural custodian." MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY dissects the many meanings of "masking," "concealing," "carrying," and their opposites, revealing the constant contradiction and harmony between these actions. In this body of work, McClodden creates sculptural meditations on guns-a gold and silver chainmail helmet and a leather molded magazine of an AR15 assault rifle. Through custom lighting, the artist carefully choreographs a performance between the work, space, and viewer. Adding to McClodden's narrative and highly psychological concepts, this publication includes a poem by acclaimed writer and artist Rhea Dillon as well as a conversation between poet Simone White and the artist.

Reviews

"Best Art of 2022"

--Roberta Smith "The New York Times"

--Jerry Saltz "Vulture, New York Magazine"

-- "Cultured"

Author Bio

Tionna Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden's interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Most recently, she is the recipient of the 2021-2023 Princeton Arts Fellowship, and in 2019 received a Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. In 2017-2018, she curated A Recollection. + Predicated. as a part of the multi-artist retrospective Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental at both the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and The Kitchen in New York. Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer, and poet based in London. Examining and abstracting her intrigue of the "rules of representation" as a device to undermine contemporary Western culture, Dillon questions what constitutes the ontology of Blackness versus the ontic. Simone White is a poet and critic. She is the author of or, on being the other woman (2022), Dear Angel of Death (2018), Of Being Dispersed (2016), and House Envy of All the World (2010). She teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.