a'driane nieves

My work is not representative of our external; instead it is about our (Black) bodies, experiences, traumas & triumphs, healing, & identities from an internal perspective. Each piece is a part of the body, psyche, and soul turned inside out; the intimate recesses, fault lines, eroded sediment, gravity wells, multitudes, & universes we contain as we navigate a society that judges us by what can be seen with the eye. If figurative, portrait, & other representative visual works of art are the organs, muscles & bones…then abstract is the marrow, the synovial fluid, the neural pathways, the CNS, the vitreous body through which we view and process experience. I use raw emotions, expressive marks, gestural lines, and abstract form to give name to time and place as well as the “how” and “what”. Doing so allows for an intimate, vulnerable, and honest examination of what shapes our identities over the course of our lives and drives our behaviors. It all comes from an intuitive, spiritual place that draws upon my own experiences from childhood to present. I have known displacement, disembodiment, and disassociation intimately as an individual, and our collective experience with each across the diaspora is encoded in my DNA.

I am a human being with intersecting identities (Black/woman/queer/mother/chronically ill) that exist under oppressive norms. If my external is political, so then is my artistic voice and the style(s) it’s expressed through, even if it doesn’t depict anything literal. If my very existence itself matters, then so does my artistic voice and the style(s) it’s expressed through. My taking up space allows for my work to create its own, free from any expectation other than to just be; which is something that my own person is not allowed as every part of me externally and internally are impacted by oppression.

As a survivor of abuse, painting is an excavation of everything I hid in my mind and body for survival during childhood. It is an act of reclaiming my voice, as well as my way of establishing agency over my own body and the messages told about it and its worth. Painting is also how I process and heal from trauma and understand its impact on my life as a woman and mother raising my own children. I examine pain and investigate its impact within the body & psyche while also celebrating the resiliency, joy, and transformation that can occur in spite of it in my paintings.  Because my work is rooted in and influenced by abstract expressionism, I’m intrigued by our internal processes as we experience life as an Other, both individually and collectively. By focusing on the impact of trauma-inherited, personal and historical-my work exposes how trauma itself shapes, alters, and redefines our identity and self-narratives over the course of our lives. I rely on abstract forms and composition to communicate how the biological and emotional processes of adaptation, recovery, and transformation exist within us as we experience living.