Art: Jessica Moss talks curating Chris Watts’ “Blahk on Blahk on Blak” on HappeningsCLT

“Chris Watts’ 2017 series, ‘Blahk on Blahk on Blak,’ considers the effect of media representation and police brutality on the black body. Through painting, Watts questions how the desire to visualize trauma might affect us overtime,” explains curator Jessica Gaynelle Moss to Happenings CLT about how the artist’s work was informed by the responses to video footage of anti-Black police brutality. Moss expands:

“Through a process that begins with the artist exposing himself to the footage from body cameras, public surveillance tapes and pedestrian iphone footage, Watts experiments with creating visual representations of suspended historicity and trauma. Watts says, ‘While going through the reels to trim and edit, I was always really affected by it. Often times depressed for days after trying to edit. Listening to Diamond Reynolds guide us through the incident which resulted in the death of her boyfriend Philando Castile is still unfair but also remarkably important. How are these images not efficient?’”

Watts’s work helps audiences gauge the importance in asking questions like: What are we documenting and archiving? How can the intent and content of a collection of documentation directly impact on us as bodies and souls?

View more work on the artist’s website here.

Read Moss’s full essay “Blackness Illuminated” on Happenings CLT here.