Artwork
Video
New Air is a body of work that explores elements of bilocality and communication through the medium of wind, experimental video, and sonic exploration. Within my work, I engage with the soft boundaries/boundary-less-ness that exist within nature, the mind, and organisms of memory. By delving into the substrate of our physical senses I reconsider how identity will be transformed in the future through the lenses of interspecies kinships within new ecologies and systems of technology.
Air in my current body of work is a point of conjuncture for examining our collective past, migration, and diasporic memory. The concept of air or the ether becomes the medium, messenger, and witness of the landscape and our subconscious. I question whether the land holds within it a certain quality of language. Much in the way that plants express themselves through invisible hormones released into the atmosphere, does a place cultivate its voice through means unfamiliar to the human eye, or ear?
Could language exist within the ether?
This method of sharing information struck me as beautiful, in that much is expressed without words, and how so much of what we as humans would like to relay often gets lost in translation. During the pandemic, isolation, silence, distance, and longing are words I would use to describe my own state and that of many of my loved ones. Air became the great separator. Air and breath are materials that at one time seemed so harmless or ethereal. Now, to share breath with another almost feels taboo, tainted, and uncertain.
Since I relocated to Los Angeles, I often think about the heavy, humid air of my home in Atlanta, Georgia, and how the scent of decaying forests and pollination regularly blankets the environment. It is forever implanted in my consciousness. In moments of mild Deja Vu, I can be transported across the country instantly to this place. I feel through my skin now how this atmosphere contrasts the smoggy, sharp, dry air of Los Angeles and how it must differ drastically from the air of my mother's home country in Jamaica. During this time I often dreamt about connecting with my loved ones through this invisible medium, to share an intimacy that at least in the foreseeable future, seemed like a distant memory or some caveat of our human past.
I also began to think about air as an action. The force that has moved materials, and people. By sea and otherwise. The wind carried many of my ancestors to new locations. Forcibly and by choice. This element that held unknowns, escaped their lungs. Became a part of the land. This is the same air that I bring into my body. I breathe bits of them as I walk through this world. The air for me is living and has form. Holds sentience.
Iman Person is a first-generation Jamaican-American artist and cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of Black and Indigenous technologies, and their connections to ritual, the land, language, and cosmic time. Using Africana cosmologies and personal experience, Iman channels speculative visions of Black futurity through intuitive writing, video, real-time data, experimental sound, and object-making to shape unexplored ideas concerning living archives and sovereignty.