Black Hole Interregnum

In my practice explore the lingering echoes of personal and collective histories through the tactile and transformative potential of material processes. My work addresses trauma, healing, addiction, race, masculinity, and identity, using materials like tobacco, alcohol, ash, baking soda, and maple syrup to examine the weight of past actions and how they persist in the present. These materials, chosen for their symbolic and sensory resonance, serve as metaphors for the layers of memory, culture, and experience that adhere to us, often invisibly.

My process, like the concepts I’m engaging with, is one of development, resistance, masking, transferring, and exposing. I incorporate mixed media techniques and alternative photographic processes such as cyanotypes and image transfers, alluding to the act of revealing and concealing, presence and absence. This relationship between materiality and metaphor parallels the physical and emotional residues that accumulate over time – those imprints of history and memory that refuse to disappear but instead transform and reemerge. Central to Residue is an exploration of how blackness, masculinity, and identity are inscribed on the body and the world. Through abstraction, collage, and sculpture I focus on the body’s gestures and movements, often obscuring the face to emphasize the universal and abstracted elements of human experience.

The body, marked by shadows and materials, becomes a site of both history and possibility – a canvas where identity is continuously shaped and reshaped. Incorporating the tactile and the performative, my work engages the viewer in an act of looking that is both intimate and distanced, inviting to consider not just what is seen, but what remains hidden, masked, or transferred through time. These residues, like the marks of lived experience, challenge the viewer to confront the complexities of identity, memory, and healing within the broader context of race and masculinity.

Marcie Omen is part of Issue 18 by Guest Editor Hank Willis Thomas and »Guest Room: Tina Campt & Keisha Scarville«