BLCKGEEZER: Black Nausea / 24

Following the experience of personal illness, BLCKGEEZER expands on and develops an extensive engagement with the writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon importantly shot through the prism of Lola Olufemi’s powerful Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, which the author positions as “a book of failure and mistake; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.” The works BLCKGEEZER has produced here begin by invoking powerful themes surrounding maternal instincts to feed and nurture, fertility as well as explorations of mother-child iconography. These paintings then go further to explore ‘Black’ not merely as a form of resistance, but as a material expression of existential persistence and do so with wisdom, wit, rage, humour, and generosity.

The concept ‘Black Nausea’ is a term coined by the artist. Black–its associative bond animating the term nausea–creates an uneasiness that offers a transformative state, perhaps even a new trajectory for the lived experience. In the artist’s own words: “I came up with ‘Black Nausea’ after my experience of chemotherapy. It is an ongoing speculation and pillar. I’m thinking about the unease and discomfort of black… I think black nausea is a space for me to think, question, and speculate, there’s no right or wrong.” The painting Barren Cassareep evinces a sense of play echoed in numerous nuances present in BLCKGEEZER’s work. Barren, which connotes infertility, is a play on the word baron–a reference to the Caribbean cooking sauce comprised of black liquid. A key here is the connection between forms and materialities–all that is produced through contact–a sweat that is at once bodily, experiential, conceptual, and existential.

Another conceptual neologism BLCKGEEZER has coined is ‘Breastistentialism’. Central to this work is aligning thought and imagination to question existence from a new perspective, one that is otherwise and ‘breast-centred’ and holds everything at stake. The proposition: black, breast, and blackness as abstraction that comes forward as a method and mode–a way of being in the world–to think other than the dominant and prescribed in a nuanced perspective.

ABOUT THE ARTIST 

BLCKGEEZER aka Miya Jazmin Browne (b. 1997) is an artist born and based in London. BLCKGEEZER holds a BA from the University of Westminster (2020) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2023), and was the recipient of the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship (2022-2023) as well as the Chadwell Award 2023. Recent exhibitions include MANIFOLD DELUXE at No.9 Cork Street (2023); BUFFER 2, Guts Gallery (2023); and Transforming Legacies at Black Cultural Archives (2022), an exhibition looking at Black British Art history curated by Pacheanne Anderson.