Lola Flash

Have Mercy (from the “syzygy, the vision” series)
36 x 24
Photograph, Digital Sublimation print on metal

In this self-portrait series entitled “syzygy, the vision”, I am speculating about Black cultural conflict, through the lens of Afrofuturism. My soul is hopeful that our future plight, will be divine, yet heavy on my mind, is America’s mass incarceration horror. In fact, there are multiple dimensions of intersectional disadvantage of our long and often, unsettling legacy, which consume the tenants. Yet, our truth-seekers can only lead us to the possible, a destination where we are superhuman – shedding our black bodies of institutional “isms” and are finally able to run anew, far away from hashtag chatter and into an imagined narrative of joy. Many of my favorite artists; Sun Ra, The Funkadelic’s, Octavia Butler, Renee Cox, Missy Elliot, and Janelle Monae, have explored various concepts of Afrofuturism within the literary, performing, and visual arts. Syzygy uses these iterations as a referential idea within a visual call and response tradition, gleaned from the African musical tradition in which societal limitations are declaimed and redefine to elicit recurring responses from syzygy’s audience. This series defines and memorializes a universal cosmos of a conscious past, present and future as an adaptable contemplation of Afrofuturism for the twenty first century.