Q & A with Shellyne

LP: Can you tell us a bit about your work and your practice as an artist? I work in a variety of mediums: drawing, painting, collage, works on paper and sculpture, and mostly around the same ideas I’ve been kicking around for the last six years, which is trying to narrow down a psychic space that contends with the despair caused by oppression.  I look at things like false hope and the mechanisms of false hope and the strategies of survival and I look at that specifically in the area where I live, where I was born and raised, in the South Bronx. I find inspiration in found objects, in detritus, in the documentation of interior spaces. My work is also in conversation with the baroque, in the way it illustrates the emotive. I call it el quebrao, or the broken baroque, a decolonizing of the baroque. Because we cannot help but be infected by the colonizer’s culture whether we want it or not, but just like the idea of syncretism, we posses it but we also change it, and we become a hybrid of it.  To me, all of this is fundamentally tied to hip hop culture, because my work is about the sample and the remix.

LP:  Tell us about some of the activities you have planned while you’re our inauguralArtist-in-Residence. I am very excited to be the inaugural artist in residence. It’s a long time coming and I am very grateful for this space for us diaspora folk.  Some of the things I have cooking up next spring is this exhibition we curated with The Latinx Project’s curatorial team, PELEA: Visual Responses to Spatial Precarity looking at how artists and the

Latinx community at large is responding to displacement, and how we’re doing this as artists, organizers, and members of our communities. I will also be hosting a panel at NYU with activists from these different enclaves. We’re still in conversation but I’m thinking about highlighting the fight in Sunset Park against industry city, and the recent struggles in Inwood and the Dominican community there, and our ongoing fight against rezonings citywide, but specifically for me in the southern boulevard section of the Bronx. Some of the artists participating in the show will also be part of a panel where we will be talking about these cross-sections.

LP:  We’re also very excited about the tours of the exhibition you’ll be hosting with NYU students and the larger community so everyone can learn about the exhibition. Tell us a bit about your pedagogic strategies. I am also a museum educator and very accustomed to talking to young people about art and helping them unpack and see past its layers. I was fortunate enough to help select the art in the show so I feel that I’m more than equipped to talk about it and get young people to see how these are visual responses to spatial precarity and how they may see that precariousness in their own lives and how they may respond. I know the exhibition will be a great launching pad for thought.

LP:  Any last thoughts? Yes – educate, agitate, organize! Shout out to the BX!