CHRISTIE NEPTUNE

STATEMENT:

A performance. A dance. A gesture recorded with light. About. The want. To be. Filled. To Carry. To touch ground(s). Pulling days of yore into today. With my convictions, I carry the past and reimagine the fullness of time. Vessel. A constellation of memories. Wrapped in space. 

I am interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space. Through the formal praxes of portraiture, moving image, sculpture, and performance, I explore how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Critically aware of self, I employ varying degrees of subjectivity to shift axes of language and power within representational practice. Utilizing the values and semiotics of black culture, industrial and domestic objects, and the material properties of film, I foreground phenomenological blackness, the intricate and wide-ranging dimensions of black life.

My work draws from my lived experience within the American urban, mid-20th-century minimalist aesthetics in art and architecture, feminist geographies, and processes of conceptualism. Through screen practice, assemblage, relational aesthetics, and the marked conventions of visual culture, I explore the disintegration and reconfiguration of time, language, and memory. In my work, (re)animated objects and lens-based media meander a thin line between real and imagined space to foster new sensibilities of seeing and knowing. This intervention moves the camera's gaze beyond temporal boundaries and spatial dimensions to enable the persistence of new knowledge formations across both dominant and marginal spatialities. As a material conduit within this schema, the body and framed objects channel the history(s) of yore, colliding the past and present to reimagine the fullness of time.

BIOGRAPHY:

Christie Neptune is a Caribbean American interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar based in Oxford, UK. She received her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Art, Culture, and Technology, and her BA from Fordham University in Visual Arts. Neptune's work has been exhibited at venues including Gagosian, New York; We Buy Gold, New York; Martos Gallery, New York; Tilton Gallery, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and the Queens Museum, amongst others. Her work is in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. In 2021, she was awarded the Prix Medeos for the presentation of her work at Art-O-Rama, Marseille. Her work has been widely discussed in publications such as 4 Columns, Artforum, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Her numerous awards and residencies include Backslash at Cornell Tech fund, Light Work Artist-in-Residence, NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, Smack Mellon Studio Residency, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Fellowship, among others. During the 2023/2024 school year, Neptune was a visiting lecturer at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, The New School. Neptune is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and St. Hugh’s College of the University of Oxford.

*Curriculum vitae available upon request.