Breathe with Balling Fist

Philip Andrew Crawford, MFA 2022, Sculpture

The study of "fast images" is central to my artistic practice. I investigate ways to slow down their reading to unsettle hegemonic historical narratives, challenge systems of oppression and reclaim technologies of power. In my work, fast images take the form of visual representations, statements, objects and sounds appropriated from popular culture. Common and commodified, these things are fast not only because of the speed at which they are produced and consumed, but because the narratives they transmit conform to the ways we expect the world to be.

Breathe with Balling Fist is a proposition about black life, black livingness, escape, entrapment, rupture, refusal, and radical self-possession. Animated equally by references to kung fu culture, archival documentation, and Disneyfied romanticism, the work presented here are part of a larger project that broadly considers concerns of the self alongside imperatives for self-defense.