Finding Necessities
by Luis Vasquez

SWAY

My work in the exhibition, I cried so much I felt the universe pass through my eyes, is a video shot on the northwest coast of Trinidad. The collection of phrases that appear in the video are notes from my personal journal from the year 2013 - 2016. These notes are reflections on Blackness, failure, hopelessness and death. Using Derek Walcott’s poem "The Sea is History" and Elizabeth Deloughrey’s essay "Heavy Waters: Waste and the Atlantic Modernity" as a point of departure, I try to manifest my complex relationship with water.

These writings are also part of my wake work, which Christina Sharpe defines as " to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un / imaginable lives. With this analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery."^[1] The phrases in the video are not in order, they are meant to be open ended thoughts that may carry the viewer to make their own connections with them.

The exhibition opened on November 12, 2020 at ICOSA Gallery in Austin Texas. It was featured on the Austin Studio Tour, which is a Virtual + Outdoor celebration of Austin artists that introduces the public to new ways of experiencing art.

Finding Necessities is an exhibition curated by Sydney Mori. The exhibition navigates the viewer through works of curiosity, resistance, healing, and imagination. Without curiosity we remain stagnant, without resistance we don’t evolve, without healing we lack tenderness, and without imagination, we cannot escape. These grounding gestures ebb and flow throughout one's existence, playing a role in the evolution of self.

The Artists in the exhibition include:

Alejandro T. Acierto | Nashville, TN                                                    

Yunkyoung Cho | Baltimore, MD

B. Chehayed | Brooklyn, NY                                                                                      

L JANELLE | Houston, TX                                                                               

Kirsten Lofgren | Austin, TX                                                                              

LaRissa Rogers | Ruckersville, VA                                                                       

Luis Vasquez La Roche | Trinidad and Tobago                                   

Rodell Warner | Austin, TX

I cried so much I felt the universe pass through my eyes has also been shown in:

Direc2Video at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Virginia (2020)

Afrikana Film Festival in Richmond, Virginia  (Official Selection) (2020)

The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (2020)

InLight at 1708 gallery in Richmond, Virginia (2020)