Gallery 102 Presents 'A Home Built From Memory'

Gallery 102 is pleased to present A Home Built from Memory, a selection of works by five artists that explore real and constructed memories of diaspora, migration, and movement through objects, documents, and artifacts. Using photography, painting, video, and installation, these artists re-imagine and re-construct the experience of place and displacement, while considering what we bring and what we leave behind in the process.Professor and author Vijay Agnew writes, “The past is always with us, and it defines our present; it resonates in our voices, hovers over our silences, and explains how we came to be ourselves and to inhabit what we call ‘our homes.’” A Home Built from Memory captures the in-between, and the not so often thought of or remembered. Each artist mines personal and alternative archives to re-frame and re-create “home,” in the many senses of the word: physical and mental, brick and mortar, flesh and bones. Home is sustained by memory, and memory becomes the tool through which each artist re-builds such homes.
 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nakeya Brown (b. 1988, Santa Maria, California) received her BA in Visual Arts and Journalism & Media Studies from Rutgers University. Her photography has been exhibited at the McKenna Museum of African American Art, Woman Made Gallery, Transformer Gallery, and Welancora Gallery. Brown’s work has been featured in publications such as New York Mag, Saint Heron, Dazed & Confused, The Fader, and NYLON, and has been published by international publications, Hysteria and Elephant. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A in Photography at The George Washington University. She is a recipient of the 2017 Post-Graduate Residency at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia.
 
Yodith Dammlash (b. 1986, Washington, DC) is a photographer, archivist and editor based in the DC Metropolitan area. She received a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Corcoran College of Art and Design. Dammlash’s professional and artistic works have been featured online as well as in print publications, including The Week: Captured, Sally Hemings Dream Zine, Nueva Luz Photographic Journal, Electric Revival, Rooted In Magazine, East City Art, The Root, MSN and Huffington Post. Her photo-based work explores her own Ethiopian-American ancestry through the lenses of womanhood and collective memory. Most recently, Dammlash was selected for Addis Foto Fest 2016, an international photo festival with the mission to unite Africa and the world through photography.
 
Avi Gupta (b. 1982, Washington, DC) works as an exhibiting artist and as Director of Photography at US News & World Report where he has over 15 years of experience. Solo museum shows include the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Orlando Museum of Art in the US and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art and Nottingham Castle Museum in the U.K. Alongside private collections, his work is held in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s Asia Pacific Center.
 
Antonio McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation. Through appropriating and manipulating portraits, he engages in prescribed views of individuals and reworks images to provide an alternate—more layered image and concept of the people depicted. His photographs oscillate between formal considerations (modifying appearances and prints) and imaginary potential (establishing new back stories and roles) for the portraits. The source of the artist’s current portraits (Counter-Archive Project) is The Exhibition of American Negroes organized by W.E.B. Dubois, Thomas Calloway, and Historic Black Colleges for the Paris 1900 International Exposition. The exhibition was a photographic, economic, and legislative survey of middle-class blacks in Georgia. Antonio creates work that rests in the past, gets filtered through his experiences and artistic practice, and is shared to an audience to offer something anew.
 
Handirubvi Wakatama (b. 1991) is a Zimbabwean born artist who resides and works in the United States. She uses a wide variety of mediums, gathering inspiration from notions of home, identity, gender, alongside other social issues. Her work has been shown at galleries and alternative spaces for group exhibitions in New York, Maryland, Washington D.C., as well as in London.