The 22 Magazine

FRIDAY: 

“HUNTING SOMETHING SPHERICAL AND PEELING” Nyugen E. Smith [NEW JERSEY]+Esther Neff  [NYC]
Nyugen E. Smith (b.Jersey City, NJ, 1976) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator currently examining particular behaviors, customs, coping strategies, and psychological effects unique to blacks in the West Indies and Africa under European Colonial rule. Esther’s oniono is a part of a series of performances conflating specific vegetables with emotional experiences solely blamed on “external societal pressures.” The subject hunts for something spherical and peeling, a tumor or something else that won’t peel down to nothing, something inside but not like itself. There is no reflection here. Its stench bonds to the molecules around the head. Nobody is like it, the empiric, objectified self is somewhere at one of the cores, ideal-ly the flesh can be pitted out, eaten as identity, which must be found, without it, we are told, we must remain in the ground/on the ground.

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