100% Kanekalon, 2023

George Fox University, Newberg OR

This series Hairscapes, began as a form of preservation, documenting curated compositions of deconstructed and revised protective hairstyles using synthetic and human hair to create an alternative approach to self-portraits. The large-scale photographic prints magnify the twists, tracks, locs, and wigs, creating an immersive experience depicting part of my lived experience as a Black American woman. This work plays with and centers hair as a cartography of memory–a complex joy of what is fabricated (and what remains) when we shift, change, and construct meanings in our embodied multiple experiences of Blackness and, perhaps, of Black femme identity/womanhood(s).

Exhibition documentation by Adam Long

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Complex Structures: Indelible Stories of Coming Home