kara springer

I / must be given words

In I / must be given words, high resolution scans of Springer’s skin have been transformed into deep, oceanic blues, through a simple digital function that inverses the color spectrum. These image-shades are thrown even further into flux due to the lightboxes’ ever-changing brightness: their light ebbs and flows in tandem with Springer’s breathing patterns, transmitted in real time from a device worn by the artist to a kind of central motherboard that connects them all. Containing myriad possible formal and conceptual influences, I / must be given words finds truth in the confounding of sensory experience and perception—suggesting that an unstable ground is perhaps the most productive one from which to begin making meaning.

I / must be given words borrows its title from the poem “Negus,” by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite. Central to “Negus” and Brathwaite’s larger oeuvre is the understanding of creolization as a powerfully subversive creative force—an idea with applications far exceeding a conventional understanding of how language evolves and functions. For Brathwaite, creolization becomes a philosophy of being, an existential answer surfacing in the wake of, and in living resistance to, the incomprehensible traumas of European colonization.

— excerpted from Ana Tuazon for Patel Brown Gallery