image: Amina Ross, digital collage portion of Vision of Beauty, 2021

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”

– Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Springsteen Gallery and guest curator Zion Douglass are excited to present a recollection of dreams, an experimental exhibition that stages a conversation between artists Amina Ross and dana washington-queen. The exhibition explores dreaming as a sensory experience that can articulate freedom sourced from the ancestral and autobiographical. Through the use of sculpture, video installation, and sound, the artists construct speculative worlds that are rooted in Black queer modalities of healing.

Amina Ross’ sculptural experience Etheric Bridge (Spring’s Sutures) merges a 4-channel video with machine made and natural materials. Composed of steel, cups from friends and family, rain water, tap water, and reclaimed cedar wood from New York City water tanks, this newly commissioned work conjures an architecture that extends the artist’s physical and material interest in collaboration. Together with Jared Brown and an ephemeral group of hand embroiderers — Samantha Kerr, Savannah Wood, Sienna Kwami, Savannah Imani Wade — Ross’ practice invites us to seek beauty in the undoing of anti-Black capitalist labor systems.

dana washington-queen’s two-channel video installation, Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered, is the first presentation of an in-progress hybrid documentary that excavates personal historiography and colonial fragmentation. The three-part film journeys from a speculative origin story through the ancestral and into the present, providing a nuanced constellation of Black life that uses sensory elements to exceed the limits of representation as a visual strategy. The film introduces “Black Noetic Theory” (BNt), an audiovisual method in development by washington-queen. BNt “seeks to push against the bounds of genre and production strategies, collapsing distinctions between documentary, cinema, video, and performance, echoing the incoherencies of Black life, history, and memory.”1

Amina Ross and dana washington-queen pivot between spiritual, digital and physical realms; between the embodied and the emotional; jostling us towards habitable dreamscapes where fragmentation evolves into a holistic process of knowing, feeling, and breathing into liberatory possibilities.

a recollection of dreams is curated by Zion Douglass, an MFA candidate in Curatorial Practice program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The exhibition has been generously supported by MICA’s MFA in Curatorial Practice and Springsteen Gallery. For more information, please contact Springsteen Gallery at [email protected].