We Are The Vaccine by Red Ash Hill

Red Ash Hill: Born on the South Side of a Northern City, Redwood Hill is an autodidactic, multi-hyphenated visual/literary artist, seeking to situate themselves within a community & practise of archival reconstruction and revisioning of modern, culturally dominant lenses. By employing high pigment, language, disparate materials, & expressive mark making, they interrogate a chaos of identities in a ceaseless ending and renewal under racial capitalism, presenting othered bodies that articulate extreme fatigue, stress, are in states of rest & resistance, suffused with context and texture of the lived and imagined experiences of other queer, black bodies in relation to systems of globalism. Represented on canvas, in critical verse, in swirls of copper monies, spiraling towards worthlessness, & in the burning and mending of backs of wood. Redwood’s work reflects the mutability of identity and social location, making an offering of returned raced&politicized gazes in the work to expose endemic colonialism and as a pathway for the reclamation of selves from imposed colonized realities. Redwood works to incorporate correlative, manual techniques, and personal narrative into their praxis, braiding language into material as visual & literal device to explore social categories, cultural identity, hierarchies, correlative value systems, often using pun play. To study Ideological Impacts of structural violence, DuBois’ Double Consciousness, and Hartmans archival reconstruction are all major projects that influence Hill’s work. This grant will provide the material resources necessary for the expansion of this sovereign body of work of reclamation of selfhood and description of self. In a practise of writing, mixed media, collage, painting & drawing, etymologies and neologism, Redwoods work is an advocacy for reconnection to ancestral, spiritual selves. They incorporate visual codes and symbolism to restore agency to “The Other”, by exploring the body, and how it communicates; using a system of symbolism; eyes, mouths, hands, and juxtaposing these symbols with ostensible dysfunction to convey a conflict of duality, of ability, and internalised powerlessness, met with the power of inherited primordial infinence. Redwood employs multiple aesthetics and materials to communicate pluralism and the fragmentation of existing within the “duality” of the so-called “Double II Consciousness”. With an aesthetic that nods towards a dedicated, mundane Afro-Futurism. By using contrasting materials, Redwood expands the artist's role of disruption of social process and identity. Work that intimates the simultaneity of liberated and subjugated. Fluid and institutional. Reeking and antiseptic.