Jamison Edgar: Artist statement (in englischer Sprache)

Below a thin layer of topsoil, the earth of my home state is red. The rust-colored clay of the American South is poor in nutrients, but its high pigmentation makes the dirt a powerful dye—one that stains water, skin, and jeans. I grew up learning where to find patches of the dense material and how to craft potions of vinegar and salt to combat their sticky stains. When it became ill-mannered to play in the mud, however, I did not seem to notice. I stopped growing up and began to grow out of place. Unbeknownst to me, my queer body was marked in a way that vinegar could not erase—made prey to a different form of slow erosion. Remixing strategies in paint, video installation, and performance, my archive-oriented art practice abstracts historical records and sculpts cultural memories in an effort to expose the complex machinery behind technologies of visibility and suppression. My projects are rhizomatic in form and are guided by an intersectional study of race, ecology, indigeneity, and queerness as articulated within the U.S. American Southeast and Southwest. I co-opt a queer and Southern vernacular to share stories of resistance, flourishing, and joy. I aim to stick to the normative and the unquestioned, allowing my sappy, faggy, queer affect to gunk up the pillars of visible and invisible oppression. Trained in the tradition of painterly abstraction, I look for gestural undercurrents in historical paradigms. I employ abstraction as both a formal tool of disorientation and a critical lens for making space. My abstraction is embodied, and it gestures toward times and places I could never physically go. I want to sink beneath the archive, go below the sheetrock of its degrading palace, and touch a cluster of histories that no document can effectively contain. It’s an impulselike sex without penetration. Like a heat lamp and I’m a bug in electric shock. It’s a mess. It’scamp. It has pushed me to paint, to sculpt, to write, to perform. I will try anything to squeeze myself into the drains where residues collect. My studio is a leaking vessel.

I work best collectively, weaving between filmmakers, historians, archivists, data scientists, and performance artists. I cross-examine through contradictions and prioritize the accumulation of fragments as one productive model to disrupt racist, sexist, and xenophobic claims to knowledge production. I make painterly anti-monuments for what poet Dana Ward and essayist Maggie Nelson call “the many-gendered mothers of my heart.” They are monuments to footsteps. Monuments to precarious gatherings. Monuments for communities who share secrets through word of mouth. They are sexy. They are fuzzy. They are full of eyelashes and acrylic fingernails. They illuminate, obscure, and take up space.