In My Hood(ie):Threatening

In My Hood(ie) Post Card Series

In my studio recently I began to photograph myself wearing my grey hoodie to commemorate the national discussion of the events surrounding the shooting death of a Florida black teen, Trayvon Martin. The media storm and responses to it began to integrate visual  and audio representations. This firestorm also made other incidents like this one that occur around our nation more frequently than we want to acknowledge-more visible. Another young black male, 20 years old was shot to death-and the shooter protected under a similar citizen weapon "self-defense" law in Wisconsin called the Castle Law. This young man's name was Bo Morrison and there are questionable circumstances leading to his demise in the eyes of concerned community and family.

That said as an artist, we process this information and absorb and then reinterpret it. The day I experimented with these post card images in my studio via my mac Photo Booth, I was reflecting on a sound-bite I heard on the news. Trayvon's Martin's mother's voice in response to the turn in news stories reported about her son's innocence-was defensive and fraught with grief. The news reported that Trayvon had been expelled from school (in the past) for having a bag with "traces" of marijuana. Her response was that this information leak was an attempt to justify his killing and was a deliberate character assassination of her boy/child. I will google and post what I can find of her remarks here.

The series begins with me realizing that I can look down or up in the frame at the other images the spontaneous shutter is creating. I began to play with where I would position my eyeline and play with my own blurred image as a way to comment on perception, or a fear of a "signified and imagined #youngblackmalethreatening# Identity, of someone in a hoodie.

I will continue to work on this form and to shoot them as single frame portraits using an SLR and then photoshopping them into the 4 or more frame references that you see here in draft.

a link to Vimeo where I have some additional earlier video works.

http://vimeo.com/

Don't Hurry Back...re-edited.

Don't Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable by Portia Cobb, from Portia Cobb on Vimeo.

"Down Home" I & II: from the Gullah Land Chronicle, 2011, Digital prints,34x 21 inches. copyright Portia E. Cobb, 2010

bottle tree: Blessed Memorial

Bottle Tree:

DAYCLEAN an exhibit honoring the memory of Denmark Vesey and 30 plus men, who were executed by hanging, with him.

I mounted an installation at the Redline Gallery in Milwaukee, located at 1422 N. 4th Street. DAYCLEAN which honored the memory of Denmark Vesey, a free black man, and 36 other men- who during the summer of 1822 were brought up on charges of planning an insurrection against white slave owners in the city of Charleston and were all executed by hanging. The installation consists of bottles suspended from the ceiling to represent the bodies of these men; a bottle tree (an image you see in rural parts of South Carolina and other parts of the Gullah/Geechee Corridor). The Bottle tree is a practice that was said to have come with Africans from the Congo and the bottles, hung on dead branches of trees, capture bad spirits or energy before they enter the home. Other images in the space include actual oyster shells and pine straw from Charleston. The straw evokes memory through its musty, piney scent and the shells for me represent the recovered bones of these men, whose burials are not documented.There is a video loop projected against a white brick surface, in the space, of the sun rising with spiritual music from the Yoruba lexicon and the sound of crickets in the marsh. Sun rise is called day clean in the Gullah/Geechee language. I titled this work and its ongoing investigation...DAYCLEAN because I wondered what time of day these men would have been hung and later read that it was in the early morning. Usually when one leaves for work before day light, they refer to it as Day Clean.

There is a separate monitor with interviews of black Charlestonians who live or work near the prison where these men were detained and tried. The oldest is a gentleman whose family owned a funeral home that he still operates. He remembers being a boy in that neighborhood and recalls a story about black prisoners and of a his father (a black funeral director) receiving the body of a black man who was executed there. I will add sound bites soon.

I continue to work on expanding this conceptual work to develop a healing space that will have a memorial function to honor the integrity of each of these men. also included in and on a wall outside the space are photos I took of the interior and exterior of the Old Jail and the project buildings surrounding it.

A Crowing Hen: in memory of Gelsy Verna's collage and sketch books.

A Crowing Hen

Interview I did with Amiri Baraka about Blues

Amiri Baraka


this is copyrighted material.

Tenderness 1st version orphaned footage video

Check out this video: Tenderness_one



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I made this as a memorial for a friend who suddenly passed away. I plan to make a second panel using different footage from the same film with my own added video inserts and voice over for a sister-friend and artist, Gelsy Verna, who passed away March 11, 2008. I will miss her, though our paths crossed physically once or twice, we were and always will be kindred spirits.

fortune images

Torn

This is an image of a "found" or "orphaned" love note, which I will add to my images as objects "I remember" project.

Check out my Slide Show!

artifacts of my life

My mother and brother on Easter 1967, Santa Monica, California
My brother was a new dad at age 18.



Me and Ricky, Easter. Elipsed. I was twelve and still quite innocent.






Probably 1959. One of my earliest memories of my daddy. Taken in the Bronx, New York.


An image of my birth-certificate with my inked footprint as an identity marker.


A slide image of my mother and myself in Oakland before my move to the Mid-West.



Ricky holding me. Xmas in the Bronx 1954.







Mom and Me, abstract.