Field RESIDENT Oct 24 - Dec 4, 2021

Calli Roche

Calli Roche, She/They (b.1990, Nashville Tennessee) is an American artist and pattern maker based in Brooklyn, New York. Calli comes from long line of dressmakers, tailors, and artisans from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Much of their work is rooted in the ability to create a well-constructed object. Using practical skills, developed out of necessity, she creates artifacts to instantiate socio political stream of consciousness narratives. Her studies have taken her around the globe; the Training and Productivity Authority of Fiji, Colorado State University, and Paris American Academy. Frequently working with reclaimed objects, wood, skins, and textiles the materials take on different ontological significance in each work yet frequently allude to the fraught relationships between violence, identity, and sexuality. Their work has been exhibited at Colorado State University's Gustafson Gallery, The Colored Girl's Museum in Philadelphia, and Housing Gallery in New York City.

ROCHE'S PROJECT:
During the residency I will be exploring new thoughts surrounding identity, motherhood and belonging. Specifically, as it relates to trans-racial adoption, the Windrush generation, and queer families of choice. My hopes are to expand the width and breadth of my practice, both literally and conceptually. I have begun a series of boxes to relating to the confinement confronted when searching for liberation, housing narratives in the way that Henry Box Brown was housed when he shipped himself to freedom in 1849. This is the beginning, but not the fullness, of work I intend to create during my time at Field Projects Gallery.

My current work is a posing of questions surrounding the post-colonial, post slavery handling of, assimilation into, and the donning and doffing of western ideals surrounding individualism, success and excellence by Black people. These works are the beginnings of thoughts surrounding classism and exceptionalism in the African diasporic community. Using personal and cultural histories both true and delusive, I create artifacts to materialize internal monologues. An attempt is being made to resolve, or maybe just externalize, the tension between innate, inherited, ancestral values and indoctrinated western values. Hopefully creating space for black mediocrity, for re-evaluating our connections to capitalism and western ideas of prosperity and expanding our visions of Black futures.

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