Artist and RAGGA NYC founder, Christopher Udemezue aka Christina, has been in the studio connecting the dots between history, romance, the macabre, and community for some time in his work. Our last coverage of his practice was an introduction to his RAGGA NYC collective show, RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another (2017), at the New Museum almost 8 years ago where he worked with curator Sara O’Keeffe to bring together artists from his community to highlight all things queer and Caribbean. That group featured the likes of Renée Stout, Carolyn Lazard, Tau Lewis, Maya Monés, Paul Anthony Smith, and Christina’s own work, to name a few. Now almost a decade later, we’ve followed up with Christina and Sara to see how his practice has developed and where his journey in self-discovery/ community lives now in a self-proclaimed “horror love story” duo show, alongside sculptures by American modernist Richmond Barthé (1901-1989), at New York’s Ryan Lee gallery titled in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay, which is on view until March 9, 2024:

Sara O’Keeffe: When you and I first worked together, you already had an interest in some of the figures presented in this work. I remember when we were doing a photo shoot at the New Museum, almost a decade ago in 2016. Trump had just won the election and you were talking a lot about horror. Your work has always danced around horror, but in that show, you were thinking about historical figures, referencing Queen Nanny and others in Jamaican history. In this show, you mention the description as “panning the camera to the left and addressing William Seabrook’s lies about horrific Caribbean people in a psychedelic horror/ love story.” 

Something that I love about this body of work is that there’s a return to pulp, leaning into scenes that are juicy. The title has that pulpy and juiciness. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Christina: The title of the show is in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay. The last show I did was titled Under the Palm Tree Leaves. Both titles just came to me during my research. So much of my practice is research and the notion of location is obviously there in the title. I’m talking about a place and history, but this show feels more personal than my work has been in the past. Not so much about historical figures but about me. 

Sara: Can you talk about the guinep peels?

Christina: Guinep is a fruit in Jamaica. Some people in different parts of the diaspora call it Spanish Limes. They kind of look like grapes with hard shells. They’re super sweet and sticky.

Fast forward, I’ve been going to Jamaica a lot in the last five years or so to be in community with the queer people there, doing projects with RAGGA NYC x Connek Ja to connect the queer people here to the queer people there. It’s still been very trepidus, though, in relating to my actual land that I’m from. My family is from the countryside in Jamaica. The country is the country everywhere! Lol. Preparing for that deeper dive resurfaced my inner concerns about acceptance and “danger,” which I knew had its roots in anti-blackness that I was brainwashed in by Western thought. I had growing to do, still. 

It was two years out of the pandemic quarantine and there was so much darkness that descended on all of us, obviously, but specifically on my family, my group of friends, and my health. When I went to Bickersteth, the town in Jamaica where my mom is from, I went with so much heartbreak. I literally remember driving up the hill to get to the house and bawling in the back of the van. There’s been so much heartbreak in my life and around me. 

When I got to Bickersteth, I did not expect so much acceptance and love. Everyone I kept seeing was like, “We know you. You’re Daphne Coot, great grand Pickney [Pickney is a Jamaican Patois word for a child or children]. Nobody’s going to trouble you.” I got that everywhere I went. That trip was super important to reconnect again. I developed a deeper love for this island and how I fit. Not just fit for my people, community, or blood family but me individually and being okay with it being about me.

To circle back to the title of the show, there was a moment when I was sitting on the front step of this little pink house in the middle of the jungle where my mom and her siblings used to play as children. My great aunt is in the living room right behind me and she passes me some guineps, sugar cane, and mango. I was eating this bounty of things, throwing down the peels, sitting there in silence, and thinking like… wow. In contrast to my fears here, I am just chilling, fed, and bathed by the sun in this super bright, saturated place. I was full of this fresh fruit from my literal land. In this bliss hearing the crickets looking out at the pasture. It was this beautiful moment that was healing, sweaty, and sweet literally. 

“In this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay.” The moisture also stands for that sweat and tension I’d been feeling/ healing from. It stands for the affirming sex, romance, fever, even heartbreak… that got me to that moment and flashed before my eyes on that stoop. 

Sara: I can see your interest with secretion and slipperiness. Sheen. A little shine. I think that comes through. In this work, you’re working with resin, which literally adds this in the material. Something that interests me is that it sounds like with the trip to Jamaica, you were anticipating horror and you found something else.

Christina: I’ve been thinking about these aggressive parallels. A lot of the inflection for this show is from that burst of joy, however, where I was spiritually and emotionally was still in this space of mourning. The macabre. There is this kind of aggressive tension of: Why do I have this newfound interest in goth music recently and why am I revisiting these classic horror movies? You know, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Ganja and Hess (1973), Suspiria (1977), and Get Out (2017), to name a few. I think that for me it’s an acknowledgment that there is love, compassion, and beauty that exists up against very real aggressive and horrific storylines. 

It isn’t lost on me, that as we speak, genocides are currently happening. I often think about the “Christina’s” of Palestine or Congo who were falling in love with the boy across the street, connecting to their spirituality, and all of a sudden a bomb drops on their life. There is a video I found of this young fem Palestinian boy who is dancing to the camera that I posted online and it has been heavy on my heart. Does it always have to be in retrospect or youth when we see a people’s humanity here in the West? What is that young boy’s story in 15, 20 years? The queer stories I know are there that the West tries to cover up today just like they have done with Jamaica. We live in a horrific time. There’s this melancholy that will always kind of exist. 

This book, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor, has been so informative for this work and processing the nuance/ tension of the gothic and Black life. Acknowledging that we sit in a kind of complicated space of macabre and death all the time but keep living. Keep falling in love.  

There is still ceremony, romance, mourning, rage, queer rage, magic, spirits, as we “run from the bogeyman.” To be Black, a person of color, queer in this world, is so often tussling with the horrific. In that space, we find each other. The movie is a horror film, but the allegory is always survival and romance.  

Sara: In your images, the night feels like a blanket of stars. Very often in your images, you add a moon. It’s almost like this puncture in the scene, like an aperture opening. I often wonder about what’s happening in the scene, feeling like the opening is to something else. It’s teasing at a larger story.

I think that the idea of nightlife is an important one, because it’s been such a major part of your community, and you’ve built so much community around nightlife. Can you talk about the casting? Some of these are folks you’ve worked with before, right?

Christina: Yes! To name a few: 

Lucifer. I always say he’s my muse. He’s been in a lot of my work. I met him when I did the Recess Residency in Brooklyn. He’s sensitive and also has a really beautiful soul. Aaron is a staple in Brooklyn nightlife and a beautiful dancer. To me, he is a mother in the scene. Rashad actually is from Jamaica. He moved here a few years ago and is a Connek Ja ambassador.  

I think pieces of them remind me of me. I see so much softness in them, while they hold masculinity at the same time. They play the boys in these “movie scenes” I’ve made in these framed images and then the resin works show these gods guiding them.

Intuition has kept me safe/ healed me my whole life but especially in the last couple of years. “A voice” telling me to “do this or that” has led me a lot. That and my spiritual practice. So I asked myself: Who are/ were these deities or “voices” who led these boys 200 years ago in Jamaica?

Sara: Before we jump to these resin works, you’ve mentioned family and your chosen family. It does seem like family structure, constellations of people, and connections between people are important to this work. It feels important for folks to know that you’ve been thinking about family and home for a long time.

Christina:  Indeed. It’s a very complicated/ heavy but beautiful and reassuring conversation with family. As I get older and continue to build my own family for myself, I look at the make-up of my life. For example with the piece, remember me on those nights where the crickets go still and the sweet smell of mango keeps your fingers sticky (2024), in the show, I remember a moment with my partner. I had three surgeries, got an infection, and couldn’t eat or walk for six months. It was really scary. There was one day when I was taking a shower and I blacked out. I fell, hit my head on a knob in the shower repeatedly. When I came to, I was in bed and my boyfriend was holding me. If he wasn’t there, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I have many memories like that from the last few years that show up in the work. Not all that scary but “horror.” It has been the container. In a way, me standing up to the shadow men in my nightmares and becoming the thing that chases them back. Emboldening myself to become “the final girl.” All while looking to my circles of love around me to survive just like these boys did. 

Sara: Let’s talk about the resin works. It almost looks like something that comes from the body. There are elements that look like veins or liquid dripping. There are also these mounds on the surface where it looks like something may be breathing underneath.

I know we both love body horror like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and the scene where the TV starts to breathe. I would love to hear where you think the shapes come from and why you made these forms dimensional?

Christina: I started this resin work because I hit a roadblock with making flat images and that type of storytelling. I’ve gone back and forth about what these resin works represent and realize now that they’re surrogates or portals in a way. Surrogates/ portals of visions I have, daydreams, nightmares, and birthed from dream logic. They often come to me when I’m sleeping or in a trance state while dancing. They are coming out from the wall, folding into themselves at the edges, and moving before you to tell you something. To reflect back to you something. To confront you. 

There’s this movie Annihilation (2018) that I’m obsessed with. There’s this scene where the character is staring into this moving void and in a trance. It had me thinking a lot about these resin works as portals into other worlds that move and come at you. For these dreamy images, specific to this show, these images represent these queer gods and ceremony whispering to these boys. I did research into who these gods were/ are in the African/ Caribbean diaspora and was so inspired. Guede Nibo, a Vodou spirit caring for those who die young. Erzulie, a Vodou loa associated with love, sensuality, and beauty seen as the protector of queer people. Just to name a few. 

It battles this notion that queerness is not Black or African-rooted. There were endless women kings and amounts of queer people on the continent of Africa living out loud way before any of this. Africans indeed brought that knowledge to the Caribbean, believe it or not. The masculine and feminine were liquid before the crusades of European conquest. 

Sara: With listen to the drum, follow my voice (2024), the colors call to mind the Rastafarian flag. There’s such an intensity of that red, yellowish-orange, and the lush green against these gothic figures.  

Christina:  Yes. This resurgence of goth music in my life has had me thinking about where my interests sit in relation to each other. How my art practice, spiritual practice, love affair with goth, nightlife, need to archive, and heritage all mash into one space. In that way, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor has been super informative to help me draw the connections. Goth is very much Black, and because it’s Black, it’s very much Caribbean by proxy. Nothing says tension like the historical note that sugar, this ingredient we all eat all the time, has deep roots all the way back to colonies in the Caribbean where Africans were murdered to fulfill a global sweet tooth, literally. Just like “Southern Gothic,” I think there is an “Island Gothic” mindset that is less of a “we all wear black” lifestyle, but very much rooted in the romantic and macabre. I think I’ve been thinking of these images as a peek into this psychedelic lucid wet dream/ horror film taking place in paradise.  

There is this one quote that I want to share that I’ve been reading a lot from Leila Taylor’s book: 

“Being the monster always allows for a unique ability to see in the dark. The other has the clarity and awareness that fear obscures. To be the thing that strikes fear in the hearts of men is to know more than they do. To know them more than they know themselves. It’s dangerous. And to be sure, the villagers will always be ready with their torches, but the monster lives where you are afraid to go. It watches you while you sleep, hides in the shadows where you can’t see, it poisons the master’s tea when they’re not looking. The monster knows what you did last summer. America has gotten away with murder. For hundreds of years and it has been sleeping with its one eye open ever since.”

__

Sara O’Keeffe is Senior Curator at Art Omi. She curated Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF (2023), Pippa Garner’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York accompanied by a fully-illustrated monograph copublished by Art Omi and Pioneer Works Press. She previously held curatorial positions at the New Museum, where she co-curated Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (with Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell), was on the curatorial team for the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (with Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin), and curated projects with Sable Elyse Smith, RAGGA, Morgan Bassichis, Dynasty Handbag, among others. From 2011–2013, she was in the Curatorial Department at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has contributed to publications including Mousse, CURA, Topical Cream, and Elephant.

Born in Long Island, NY, Christopher Udemezue has shown at a variety of galleries and museums, including the New Museum, Queens Museum of Art, PS1 MoMa, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Mercer Union, Recess Gallery, Anat Ebgi Gallery and Ryan Lee gallery in NYC. Udemezue utilizes his Jamaican heritage, the complexities of desire for connection, healing through personal mythology and ancestry as a primary source for his work. As the founder of the platforms RAGGA NYC & CONNEK JA, he completed a residency with the New Museum “All The Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another” in June 2017. In 2018 Udemezue was on show in the New Museum’s “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” 40 year anniversary show and a part of the chosen artists in The Shed’s Open Call grant program/ group show in 2019. Udemezue served as Co-Chair of the board at Recess Gallery, Brooklyn NY from 2021 to 2022. Udemezue had a solo show at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles, California in 2021. More recently in 2024 Udemezue was in a duo exhibition alongside the acclaimed sculptor Richmond Barthé at Ryan Lee gallery in NYC.