Work in the exhibition draws on Gardner’s interests in Black feminist mythology and place. Each work explores an event, or sequence of events taken from the writings of Black feminist activists of the 19th and 20th century, including Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, and Winnie Mandela. Merging drawing with fragments of film and photographic projection, the works collapse and expand problem-events, such as the naïve outburst of a child that results in a moment of humiliation, with imagery saturated with spatial stories. Gardner uses excerpted texts, architectural and diagrammatic drawings to illuminate acts of spatial violence and resistance that are ultimately un-representable.
She Ain’t Gone Nowher’ opens Thursday, January 4, 2018, from 5pm to 7:30 pm, and will also be open the following three Sundays.  Sunday gallery hours are from 1pm to 4pm and will include talks and conversations by the following:

January 4, 5 – 7:30      Gallery opening

January 7, 2 pm:          Artist talk

January 14, 2 pm:        Conversation with Cheryl Morgan – Architecture and Geography

January 21, 2 pm:        Film preview

Gardner’s practice engages Black feminism through a dialogue with ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. “Space” she writes “can be produced as toxically gendered and racialized, often in ways that are illegible.” She is interested in how a practice grounded in hybrid drawing/time-based methods can activate and reimagine thick sedimented layers of time, knowing, being, and struggle. The idea of geography allows her to think about the struggle over space, place, and time, as simultaneous events that reproduce anti-blackness and orient (or disorient) the black body through various form containments.

Gardner graduated from the University of Alabama in Birmingham with a BA in studio art and minor in Art History in 2005. Next she received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, then participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2009-2010, and is now a doctoral candidate at University of Minnesota in the Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.

Ground Floor Contemporary is a contemporary art gallery providing exhibition opportunities for its member artists and guest artists, and is committed to promoting and expanding the visual arts scene in the greater Birmingham area. The gallery space is open to the public from 1pm to 4pm on Sundays and by appointment. It is located at 111 Richard Arrington Blvd S, Birmingham, AL 35233.  Please visit http://groundfloorcontemporary.com/ for more information.