dana washington-queen in conversation: Resume at the Point of Interruption

If we cannot first imagine freedom, we cannot actually achieve it. Freedom, like fiction and all art, is a process in which the dream is only the first part.

– Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness

Join us in the ICA auditorium for coffee, tea, and conversation as we glimpse into the dynamic research process for the documentary, Resume at the Point of Interruption. Artist dana washington-queen will be joined by midwife Racha Tahani Lawler Queen, designer and musician Colin Palmer, and sound artist John Dombroski. In a roundtable they will discuss the documentary’s research, production, and themes.

This experimental documentary, which lends the exhibition its title, follows Black individuals—including the artist—as they intuit and improvise their ways through the world. In the chapter on washington-queen, we see the queer non-binary photographer receiving hormone replacement therapy and meditating on themes of gender, difference, constraint, and freedom, and how they experienced the limits and possibilities of all those things while playing basketball growing up and negotiating their identity as an adult.

While the roundtable is free, we encourage those going to RSVP HERE

dana washington-queen

dana washington-queen uses narrative storytelling to explore blackness, queerness, cultural practices, and systems of power. Their research and practice bring documentary and experimental practices into dialogue through their developing concept Black Noetic theory. washington-queen received an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, and a BA in English-Rhetoric and Composition from California State University, Long Beach.

Racha Tahani Lawler Queen

Racha Tahani Lawler (Queen) is a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM), Licensed Midwife (LM), Registered & Certified Sangoma (South African Traditional Healer Herbalist), fourth generation midwife, farmer, and textile artist. August 2022 will mark 20 years of supporting homebirth families. Lawler (Queen) has supported over 1,500 families in their out-of-hospital birthing, and for a decade prioritized Black midwifery students as a clinical preceptor and academic preceptor. She is the co-founder of the nonprofit Black Farm Studio House with her spouse dana washington-queen that amplifies artists, urban farmers, and advocates for the wellness of LGBTQIA2 folks across the African diaspora.

Colin Palmer

Colin Palmer (aka Versis) is a Los Angeles writer and vocalist who synthesizes life experience into musical expression.

John Dombroski

John Dombroski is a sound artist, composer, and sound designer currently based in the Pacific Northwest. He received his MFA in Sonic and Visual Arts from UCSD, his BFA in Kinetic Imaging from VCU, and is a Skowhegan alum. His work is concerned with acoustic ecology, openness (as praxis), and listening with intent to understand invisible histories and realities that encompass our world.