Aaliyah Phaedra Reynolds
Mother Tongue Mother Beak
Aaliyah Phaedra Reynolds (she/her) was supported to produce Mother Tongue Mother Beak, a series of multimedia works spanning sculpture, video performance, written work and photography that facilitates the recovery and transcription of a “metaphysical tribe” of Black women with the power of flight.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice encompasses many ideas - some of my current work focuses on bridging the perceived dichotomy between spirituality and the internet. My recent work has been much more narrative than in the past, so I have been focusing on the significance of folktales and cultural memory. One way that these two ideas have merged is through my work concerning Black navigation on the internet and within its interfaces, how black people use the internet and its relation to historical spiritual practice and ritual. For example, how Instagram dance trends mirror the styles and cultural sharing of African ritual dances throughout time. As a person who doesn’t have a very strong recorded history because of the erasure of my people’s stories, I’ve felt an imperative to weave a “fictional history” based on folktales, relics, and metaphors. In this way I have been formulating stories to make my own history.
I’ve been doing a lot of work pertaining to spirituality and religion, but my earlier work was heavily technological and video-based, so I have been trying to find the bridge between the two. I felt it was hard to do, because things that are aesthetically coded as spiritual usually exist within the “natural” world rather than the technological world. My solution was to explore the
perceived problem, so I began asking myself: where is God within the internet? Not where is religion on the internet, but thinking of the idea of God as everywhere, where then is the omnipresent God built in to the internet’s infrastructure? One of my inspirations regarding this idea has been “Bindi Girl” (Prema Murthy 1999) a website where the artist embodies “Bindi,” [1] her online persona; she works with the idea of the “avatar” both as an online persona and as an incarnation of a god or goddess in Hindu mythology.
I work with many media. Primarily video, but also sound, sculpture, and performance. I typically use InDesign for digital scrapbooking and processing ideas. I use Adobe Premiere or any free video apps for cutting and editing. My approach to artistic process is a practice of digging for references, artifacts, images, quotes, and so on. I am constantly collecting screenshots and such, and only usually begin working on something when I feel as if the idea has fully presented itself to me as a complete form in my mind and given me permission to create it. Once that happens, it’s just a struggle to articulate my ideas in an environment that I feel is authentic to the work. I usually look to other artists to see what formal elements they use with work that seems similar to what I want to do. Finally, the work uses my soul to take form in the world.
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For inquiries, contact: aaliyahasl18@gmail.com or @pungeint