Philip Mallory Jones: LISSEN HERE!
Artist(s):
Title:
- LISSEN HERE!
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2007
Medium:
- Giclée print portfolio book, 50 pages, limited edition (100)
Size:
- 19 inches x 13 inches
Category:
Artist Statement:
LISSEN HERE! is an evocation of African-American life and culture. It is a hymn of nuanced harmonies and discords, a blending of voices, some sweet, strong, and leading the way, others rough, off-key, and wandering. “This book began life as a meld of black history and a celebration of black womanhood. It is factual, anecdotal, autobiographical. It is born of remembered snatches of my own, and anybody else’s family lore; of provocative family nicknames; of the knotted, worked-out hands of my grandmother, folded so patiently in her lap. It is the fruit of a lifetime of standing back and watching the relentless energies of a race of stricken people, steadily galvanizing toward liberation. It is listening, always listening, to the cadence, the flow, the pungent getting-to-the-heart of it, that is our speech.” — Dorothy Mallory Jones LISSEN HERE! was composed with several audiences in mind. The first is ourselves, our conversation, a play of words and images that resonate in each of our cores. Our intention was to speak clearly, simply, and without equivocation, to the truths we know. This we could do because of our shared language, experience, and perspective. Though separated by a generation, gender, and the particularities of our lives, we are both of the South Side, and the extended neighborhood that reaches into the Mississippi Delta, Kentucky, the Carolinas, rural Ohio… If we can truly express our selves, then we can also speak to the other audience, those for whom these are not retellings of family lore, heard while eavesdropping on the grownups talking in the kitchen.
