Anyway, I love you and I wish you weren't dead

Work by Ashley Ortiz-Diaz

The exhibition “Anyway, I love you and I wish you weren’t dead” is a survey of works anchored in our individual and collective struggle with mortality given our social positionalities. The work involves a process of intentionality, specificity, economy of means, and simplicity, balanced alongside chance and aliatory processes. This interplay of intention and chance reflect how the choices we make affect how we understand death. 

Of those included in this exhibition are works from Manifold Vanishing, a collection of works based on the study of Zion Cemetery in Tampa, Florida. The works of and on paper use abstraction to acknowledge the historically Black cemetery that was found underneath a housing complex, and the many other ways Black people are disappeared. The Covid-19 pandemic and the uprising against police brutality in the Summer of 2020 have made clear how the vanishing of Black people happens at multiple points: in history, and the ways we remember it, in life, and the breath we are allowed, and in minds and the trauma we inherit. Because of this, our nation is that of hollowed-out landscapes where even at rest, Black people have not been allowed to exist. The work aims to take a painful story, and lay it down with soft hands. 

The most recent work in this exhibition reflects on the story of Keystone Memorial Cemetery in Hillsborough County, Florida. Established by a freed slaves, the cemetery “disappeared” in the 1950s and remnants were found in a lake in early 2020.

manifold vanishing

1. Title Obscured (manifold 5) $100

2. Title Cannot be found (manifold 2) $150

3. Title Redacted (manifold 4) $100

4. Title Withheld (manifold 1) $150

site specific installation, collaged cotton paper, gelli print, etching, lithograph, charcoal, 2020