Untitled

Indë

Interview by L. Valena
May 20, 2024

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

The prompt was sort of like a large gummy bear that seemed to be made of white plastic. It was laid to rest on a white styrofoam surface, and had really large, sort of cartoonish lips painted on. There was a Blue Morpho butterfly in the top right corner, resting on some other white material.

What were your first thoughts and feelings when you received that?

Most of the time bears are either frightening or comforting; this one was a comforting shape, but was in an environment that made it a little weird. The lips gave the bear a personification that felt uncomfortable, and the butterfly had a few implications for me. One was about queerness; 'mariposa' in Spanish being slang or slur for gay people. The potential feminization of the bear through the lipstick also felt notable.

Where did you go from there? What happened next?

At first, a melody came into my head, and I started recording something. Sort of creating a loop around the word 'Morpho', to see if a song would come out about the relationship between the bear and the butterfly. But I turned in for the night, and didn't pick that idea back up. Then later, I was dealing with a situation. There's a gay, Nigerian friend of mine who is currently incarcerated, and facing deportation. That was heavy on my mind, and I wanted to get some feelings out through drawing. I decided to use this set of figures as the basis for that. That's what I ended up making and submitting. This is pretty far removed from the usual atmosphere of my work. It really just was an expression of trying to remember my friend's face, and thinking of the prison industrial complex as a bear that he is trapped inside. I really leaned into the unsettling nature of the prompt.

That's a really heavy collection of feelings. It sounds like you were able to connect this unsettling feeling that you were getting from the prompt, and to link it to this unsettled feeling you're having on behalf of your friend. Is that right?

Yeah. It's something I find a lot of times. Whenever I interpret a piece, and read a certain narrative into it, it always echoes something larger that's happening in my life. There are a few different situations I could have mapped onto my interpretation of the prompt, but that one was the most prescient for me to get out of my head. In my response, the butterfly becomes the misremembered portrait of my friend. He's been in prison for a year now, and I've only seen him twice. It's hard to remember features.

This line that you have in here, about it having an ‘insatiable appetite for our most fragile and vital creatures’, is gorgeous. Does writing usually play a part in your work? You also talked about starting with music -- how do these different disciplines work together for you?

I started out as an illustrator, and then was having a lot of feelings in my late teens that I felt I couldn't express through just illustrations. I was including more and more text in my work, and then feeling like people weren't spending the time with my pieces that I wanted them to be. Because music is a time-based medium that frequently includes words. It was a way to get people to really sit with my ideas and feelings for the amount of time I needed. The words here, I honestly forgot that I wrote them until you just read them. There are lingering thoughts that are really widely applicable. Words are definitely a big part of my expression.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

Right now I'm working on my fourth album, which is about growing up here in Western Mass without role models who looked and identified the way I do. My incarcerated friend is someone who holds the same identity as I do, of being Black and queer. Finding community has meant a lot in the past four or five years, and I would consider him a part of that. And yet, as I get closer to my community, I'm at more risk. Seeing how clearly people in my community are targeted, and at risk to the systems we live in. With this album, part of it is a reference to where I come from, and my experience of growing up here, and part of it is socially-driven music. There are a couple of freedom songs, a trans liberation song, and another song that's specifically about the intersectionality between communities of color, but especially Black Americans, and trans people.

This piece, as commentary on a particular story within the prison industrial complex involving marginalized people, ties into a major theme of my work as a whole. My work is dedicated to social equity, and giving voice to people who aren't able to fight.

This piece has so much grief in it, but there is this hopeful note that you can ‘kill the beast’. That gives me a lot of hope. It sounds like that hope is an important part of this body of work you're making right now.

Absolutely. The title of my solo show is Mirror Mirror: I Am My Own Role Model. Being the change you want to see in the world, and self empowerment and self advocacy, are important to my work. I was arrested two weeks ago at Umass at the Free Palestine rally. That was really scary for a multitude of reasons, but the support that has come out of that has also been giving me a lot of hope. It was a learning experience, and a traumatizing experience, but also community-building.

I'm so glad that you're okay. That sounds terrifying.

Yeah, it was ludicrous. If I remember correctly, I did this drawing before that happened. It feels like every week something happens, and I just have more that I need to make work about. Art is historically how I've processed everything. It got pretty scary after I got arrested, because I didn't feel like I had the energy to make work. I just needed to be taken care of for a while. But I'm getting my strength back.

What haven't we talked about yet?

I'm thinking about the connection between art, performance, and direct action. The place that art has within protest, and what it means to make effective protest art. In the same way that we could ask, what does a successful rally or protest look like? What does that mean? That's something I've been grappling with for several months now. I'm tired of going to marches, and vigils. There's got to be more that I can do to speak up, and I'm going to use every platform that I can to address inequities and atrocities. But there's also more that I can do, conversations that I can have, to effect change in my immediate environment, than just going to protests. The difference in risk is really palpable.

I went to the protest, and didn't have the intention of putting myself on the front lines, but then I ended up there. Whereas I can paint and sing any number of things and record and distribute them and not be incarcerated. I'm just questioning my role in this community as a marginalized person who naturally has a lot to say and things that I'm fighting for. I understand what is at risk really clearly, but also I don't want to throw my life away in a literal sense, or incapacitate myself. I know that I have a lot of power and potential, and I think it would be a waste if I'm not careful. Navigating that space between self preservation and community preservation and urgency, the need to take action now. My work is getting more and more community-oriented. I'm looking forward to my solo show in September in Easthampton, at the 50 Arrow Gallery. This whole album and body of paintings will be exhibited, and the whole community can gather around that. I'm looking forward to how I can activate that space.

Do you have any advice for another artist participating in this project?

Typically, I'm someone who really appreciates craft. Part of me was embarrassed to send in these pencil scratches on paper. I think the honesty and emotion behind it, in this case, trumps the craft of the piece. I'm glad we've had this conversation, rather than just doing a pretty picture.

It's what wanted to come through, right? That's what it's all about.

Exactly. The deadline is helpful in that sense as well -- you can't be too picky.

Call Number: O127FD | O128VA.inUnti

Indë (they/he) is an artist-scholar born, raised, and residing in Massachusetts. In a nutshell, they contend with American imperial systems of division, using multimedia compositions to combat the lynching, disenfranchisement, and misrepresentation of queer people of color. artbyinde.com
Portrait by Talia Smith.