Nathaniel Donnett

Region: West

Website: http://nathanieldonnett.com/

City / State: Houston, TX

I’m a Dark Imaginarence practitioner interested in human behavior and psychosocial concerns. “Dark Imaginarence” is a term I coined that conceptually and formally combines social observation, everyday working-class poetics, the human condition, and African-American creative cultural expression.

My most recent body of work explores tensions around disparate perspectives and forms that underscore notions of visibility, presence, and preservation as they relate to society, the black body, and black ontology. Approval and refusal, representation and abstraction, are symbolically adjacent, coexisting in dialectical dissonance. Foreclosed homes and buildings are the inspiration for the abstracted forms, and historical floor plans are superimposed as cosmological shields and masks depicting agency and sacredness while referencing time.

Space, place, and everything in between have historically operated as a location for reflection and the imaginative transformation of blackness in the United States South. The imagination responds to the innate desire for the freedom of the in/external self. The black experience and black aesthetic is a forever evolving song that I continue to replay and rethink again and again and again and...