Radio Imagination
When I am asked about my process, I often reply that I do not do preliminary drawings for my work. This is a half truth. Truth dependent on the moment and how one might define a drawing.
To draw is to pull something forth. Though colloquially, most of us are referring specifically to graphing. Graphing utilizes symbols – pictorial energies - to illuminate a message. To commune.
I’m amazed by the spaces from which we draw from. The psychospheres. The spaces that our current mainstream cosmology collapses into powerless projections. Imagination is for the “primitive world” that is stuck in arrested development. Strangely, that mainstream cosmology runs on projections: screens, hatred and biases, cryptocurrencies and capital, among others. These projections have hacked into our understandings about reality.
I am constantly drawing; constantly pulling from and offering back to imaginative scapes, some intimate and personal; others shared or impossible to walk alone in. There are archives of unborn works. As time moves forward I realize that fertility is everlasting and the pressure to give birth to all of those unborn works is based in an “ego” fear. The insatiable dot, dot, dot ..
Sound has been medicine for many of us on our visual journeys. Sound helps me to stretch out the muscles of synesthesia. I close my eyes and walk into the valley of synths. Layers of dust rising as iridescent highlights. Haunting bodies of black glistening through bass lines. When I read about the concept of “radio imagination” that Octavia Butler named, it hits. I think about the power of seeing sounds - of creating visuals and soundscapes through the power of symbols as literature (i.e. phonology). It reminds me to trust in the ability to play in the voids of the unanswered, and to create personal relationships with language, characters, space and ourselves. “Radio Imagination” provided more insight into my reverence for abstraction. Encouraging me to distance my practice and process away from the cosmology of mnemonic exactness and linearity. This is why so many of us go to the diviner already knowing the answer to our questions.
I respect when sensory expression communes the power of written word, oral histories, and sound through cellular memory. Below are some of my notes about my visual journey through the psychosphere and imagination written after Radio Imagination was installed.
-Sydney Cain aka sage stargate
Radio Imagination is on view apart of the Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism Exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California August 7th, 2021 - February 27, 2022. The installation is also paired with a soundscape Mothership Calling by Nicole Mitchell.
