‘A Restoful Place’
A Restful Place, a collection of non-adhesive collages premiering at Leyendecker Gallery on January 29, 2021, offers kaleidoscopic studies of a Black imagination. Within these works, nested negative forms liberate and reveal what is already available to us; like magnifying glasses, they expose critical and open ravines where exploration of the self can occur.
While making these collages, Kincaid deployed an improvisational approach that similarly informs Kincaid’s quilting practice. Guiding impulses – derived from ancestral and personal experiences and filtered through imagination – are seamlessly presented in the form of carefully cut textures, objects, and figures. What may once have been foregrounded elsewhere becomes backgrounded here, and the opposite. Select fragments of rest, reflection, and resistance combine to combat maladaptive cultural narratives, and in doing so, an existing framework is undone.
This non-adhesive photographic collage medium is imperative to counter the way we see what we are accustomed to seeing. By photographing the final compositions, and never fixing their constituent parts, Kincaid uses this historically restrictive mode of documentation to reshape memory and turn the definition of collage on its head. By choosing not to permanently glue or attach collage components, Kincaid acknowledges the ever-present flux of who we are, how we live, where we go, and what we do. Nothing is static; stillness is for creating; Black essence is expansive; and Black imagination is visionary.