Trevon Jakaar Coleman

Trevon Jakaar Coleman joins us as the next Artist Educator Residency Mentor. Trevon joins us from the University of Maryland, where he is finishing his second MFA program in Studio Arts, his first is in Film from the University of Iowa. 

Artist Statement:

My work is multidisciplinary, and I am thrilled with the possibilities of experimentation across mediums. I formally explore “black” as medium, language, and experience, searching for an anti-carceral production model and an abolitionist aesthetic, while meditating on landscape, linguistics, boundaries/nation states, and world building. In my studio practice, I work with obscuration of stills taken from 16mm film exhibited as photography; minerals and rocks as icons for geological migration of black bodies (forced or enforced); embracing shadows and blackness as medium; With Brechtian Alienation Theory in film I challenge form in other media, most recently textiles. By finding ways to foreground material dissonance, I can blend my figurative work in photography and drawing with a more intangible aspect that symbolizes the impossibility of defining Blackness (even temporally and geographically). I contextualize experiential and political relationships to themes, and spectacle or conventional entertainment icon relationships to content reception. I reveal process-based investigation in the blending of ideas and media in a multi/non-disciplinary mode, extrapolating context through (un-disciplined yet historicized) form.

Progress requires an investigation of conventional understanding. My work challenges expectation, iconography, language, and space, creating a distance that leaves room for inquiry. Viewers must be active participants to uncover the exploration of my own identity, representation, and perceptions within established spaces and genre. With my research I question world building and the construction of being. Taking cues from comic books,(speculative) fiction, oral history, and historicized and personal archive, I situate my multidisciplinary work in “the stutter,” the space between, and claim dysfluency as a disruption to familiarity.