Chanell Stone
Project Description
Undulation of a Rupture emerges out of the enigmatic task of touching the past in the present via the landscapes of the American South. Driven by a profound yearning to trace, locate and connect with ancestral origins I took to the land to unearth impressions of these leavings. Made across several sojourns to Mississippi and Louisiana – in what I describe as a series of familiar firsts – soon became a multi-year dance between returning while arriving. The photographs are records of her encounters and exchanges with this land. Expressed expansively through the multiple registers of: site, body and materiality these findings offer new articulations of being and relating. The land presents itself as a stage engendering the enmeshment of body, earth and ancestral memory. The body, punctuated through form, texture and movement, is wielded as a medium acting as a bridge between what is known and what is felt at the edges of visibility. The mercurial nature of Blackness arises as a complex nexus, intersecting as both a geographical site and tangible material made manifold photographically. Through these transpositions, I propose new hybrids of Black female subjectivity within a visual framework of abstraction. These renderings offer an ever-evolving inquiry and exploration of the trans-migrational body.
Bio
Chanell Stone is an artist living and working in Oakland, California. Her practice explores the phenomenology of the Black female body as both a geographic site and physical material embedded within the natural world. Drawing from the interdisciplinary frameworks of body studies, affect theory, and Black feminist thought, Stone examine how memory and place are inscribed onto and throughout the body. By casting her own body as a primary medium, she acts as a conduit, bridging lived experience with broader narratives of the Black diaspora. Her inquiries take form through photography, poetry, and material-based exploration, wherein she engages with lesser-known impressions of Black presence and belonging. Her practice negotiates possibilities for reconciliation, reverence and return within diasporic landscapes. Stone earned her BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts in 2019 and her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego in 2024. She has exhibited in institutions across the United States and internationally. Her solo exhibition Natura Negra was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco from 2019 to 2020. More recently, Stone’s work has been displayed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pier 24 Photography, Esker Foundation in Alberta, Canada, Museo Cabanas in Guadalajara and Fotografiska New York.
Honourable Mention
Series Title
Undulation of a Rupture
Website
Category
Hariban Award 2024