A restful place

A Restful Place, a collection of non-adhesive collages premiering at Leyendecker Gallery on 29 January 2021, offers kaleidoscopic studies of a black imagination. Within these works, nested negative forms release and reveal what is already available to us; like magnifying glasses, they expose critical, open gullies where exploration of the self can occur.

While making these collages, Kincaid deployed an improvisational approach that similarly informs Kincaid's quilting practice. Guiding impulses - derived from ancestral and personal experiences and filtered through imagination - are seamlessly presented in the form of carefully cut textures, objects and figures. What might once have been foregrounded elsewhere becomes background here, and the reverse. Selected fragments of rest, reflection and resistance combine to combat maladaptive cultural narratives, and in doing so, undo an existing framework.

This medium of non-adhesive photographic collage is imperative to counteract the way we see what we are used to seeing. By photographing the final compositions, and never fixing their constituent parts, Kincaid uses this historically restrictive mode of documentation to reshape memory and turn the definition of collage on its head. By choosing not to permanently glue or join the components of the collage together, Kincaid acknowledges the ever-present flux of who we are, how we live, where we go and what we do. Nothing is static; stillness is for creating; black essence is expansive; and black imagination is visionary.