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Inspired by an African American myth in which enslaved Africans were able to escape bondage by taking flight and returning to their homelands, my image renders the flying African as a glowing, celestial being moving gracefully through the Blackness of space.
The Flying African
Throughout the United States, and especially along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, stories persist to this day of enslaved Africans who escaped bondage by taking flight and returning to their African homelands. Hypotheses persist as to the origin of this myth, but many point to the 1803 slave rebellion known as Igbo Landing on St. Simons Island in Georgia, where a group of enslaved Igbo people walked into a creek drowning themselves rather than being reenslaved. As they entered the water, they chanted, “The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home,” and were thus transported to the primordial blackness from which everything emerged.
Photographic Process
In the photographs of Infinite Essence and Cosmologies, Owunna leverages his training as an engineer to explore the nuances of darkness and light. He employs ultraviolet strobes, painted fluorescent backdrops, and carefully hand painted nude bodies of Black models that only glow under ultraviolet light. When he then photographs the models in total darkness, the shutter snaps, and for that fraction of a second, synchronized beams of ultraviolet light illuminate a glowing scene that reanimates tableaus of creation from the archive of African diasporic myth.
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