Folklore for a New World Alani Nelson
Traces of My Spirit positions Elana Casey’s work as a record of contemporary folklore. Considering the portrait as the platform to document the interplay between the human and the sacred, Casey renders her community through a divine lens. Weaving together traditional African Cosmology and the oral histories of her subjects a new world is cultivated within these landscapes punctuated by glittering shadows and mirrored horizons. Representing her subjects as their “god selves,” reality and myth converge in this space. In these works, Casey’s family and friends are reconstituted as something beyond human. Transforming the mortal towards the godliest version of itself. This act has the potential to offer a terrain to nurture alternative identities for a new world. The reconsideration of the self as a deity becomes the catalyst for folklore born of the present. Origin stories and oral histories merge. The community represented in these works become the foundation for a pantheon that is intrinsically contemporary. This imagining of a new environment overflows with flora and fauna, gilded beings, and glinting textures. The works mirror back fractured reflections of what is while simultaneously presenting that unending aspect of the soul, the omnipotent “god self.” Kevin Quashie suggests that to, “Imagine postpones the logics of address, dominance, and misrecognition—the terms of an antiblack world—that interfere with 12
