Lead Time: Luther Konadu
Spring 2021
AGYU launched Lead Time in 2020 to support emerging artists and their working processes. The program is designed to facilitate independent research, offer resources, and build long-term relationships. We were pleased to continue the program through 2021 and welcomed our 2021 resident: Luther Konadu was mentored by Raymond Boisjoly and Kameelah Janan Rasheed from April 15 to June 11, 2021.
We were delighted to invite Luther Konadu into our Lead Time program, and looked forward to supporting his work, which questions the history and structure of the photographic medium. By disrupting traditional presentations of documentary portraiture, Konadu challenges how form impacts and influences meaning within the visual realm. Considering the history of photography as a tool of surveillance and categorization, particularly in regards to the Black subject, Konadu counters this historical tendency by working with friends and community as collaborators to claim agency through the construction of these portraits. Building a long-term ongoing series in which he returns and re-frames his images, Konadu highlights the tentative qualities of the medium which remain unfixed and malleable.
Lead Time is intended to offer artists financial and pedagogical support without asking for specified outcomes. This program is a process of art-making and thinking; not predetermined outcomes. We envision it as generative and open, taking a process-driven approach and building long-term working relationships between artists. Lead Time is a framework that is live, adaptable, and research-based, with the intention of activating a latent period for the AGYU while our doors are closed to the public, supporting and privileging the moments between the initiation of an idea and its resolution.
Biographies:
Luther Konadu is an artist and writer based in Winnipeg (Treaty One). He is the editor of Public Parking, a publication for critical thought and tangential conversations. His writing has appeared in Canadian Art, Aperture, BlackFlash, Akimbo, and Border Crossings. His studio activities are realized through photographic processes that give way to sculptural elements, acknowledging the legacies of the photographic medium as an interpretive site for generating new conventions and expanding fixed narratives. His photographic work has appeared in the New Yorker and FOAM Magazine. Konadu received the 2019 New Generation Photography Award and was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist and member of the Haida Nation. He is Assistant Professor in Visual Arts at Simon Fraser University, based in Vancouver and living on the unceded territory of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples & the Musqueam First Nations. Boisjoly’s artwork is often image or text-based with a central questioning of what composes a distinguishable image or constitutes definable meaning. His work regularly obfuscates direct interpretation or immediate consumption, deferring meaning by formally layering comprehension. Boisjoly is an alumni of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) where he received a BFA; he obtained an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2008. He has exhibited widely across Canada, including solo exhibitions at VOX, Montreal; Carleton University Art Gallery; and Simon Fraser University Gallery. He has been featured in exhibitions internationally, including SITElines Santa Fe; and at Triangle France, Marseille, and Camera Austria, Vienna. New commissions of his work have been presented at the Biennale de Montréal; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg. Writings on Boisjoly’s work have appeared in Mousse Magazine, C Magazine, and OSMOS Magazine. He is represented by Catriona Jefferies, Vancouver.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed was born in East Palo Alto, CA, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is a learner grappling with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. Engaging primarily with text, Rasheed works on the page, on computer screens, on walls, and in public spaces. Rasheed is invested in Black storytelling technologies that ask us to consider ways of [un]learning that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar. Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Rasheed has an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008), a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006), and was an Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar – South Africa at the University of Witwatersrand. She is the author of two artist’s books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, and others. Rasheed is the founder of Mapping the Spirit as well as the owner and founder of Orange Tangent Study. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.
Image: Luther Konadu, Figure as Index, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
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