Eckdsis
Eckdsis* (2022), was a loosely autobiographical, immersive installation. Moose—the black child protagonist— stands at the crossroads of her childhood and her teenage years. This exhibition featured four life-sized marionettes, each posed to signify Moose’s engagement in varying stages of different creative processes. Resisting initiation into the social order and racialized expectations, Moose manifests a vibrant inner world. She opposes the constraints placed on her ability to dream, imagine, and create. In this space, Moose sheds all expectations to step into the person she is to become. Those who enter the gallery were encouraged to question their positions: were they playmates and collaborators in Moose’s becoming? Or, bystanders whose presence is oppressive? This exhibition invited spectators to examine the nuances of childhood—the ways imagination lies at the intersection of fear and joy for all children but especially Black children. In this historical moment where racial violence arrests national attention, Eckdsis challenged audiences to envision play as a means of self-preservation and self-making.
*Eckdsis is an intentional misspelling of the word ecdysis; a process of molting or shedding of an outer cuticular layer, a process often seen in snakes or cicadas.
Ironically the entomology of the word is more pertinent to the context of this show borrowed from the Greek word ékdysis meaning “getting out, escape.”
