by Angela N Carroll

Forward: Black Lives Are Sacred

Angela N. Carroll

For the last five years, interdisciplinary artist Asha Elena Casey has worked to cultivate an impressive aesthetic that visualizes the divinity of Black lives and professes the power of African Traditional Religions (ATRs). I first viewed early iterations of this exploration in 2017 at Casey’s sophomore solo exhibition, When Watching God, curated by Andy Johnson, Director of Gallery 102 at The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University. What impressed me most about the series was how Casey played with texture, overlaying predominantly black and white abstract forms with figurative silhouettes to pronounce the ethereality of spiritual presence.

The works from that era were a continuation of a collection that she had exhibited earlier that year entitled Spirit Rises at the Congress Heights Arts and Culture Center. Those pieces utilized oil, mixed media, and gold leaf to visualize Black women as goddesses. This body of work established the mark-making that has come to define Casey’s aesthetic. She strategically layered dense clusters of oil paint iterated as drips, lines, and symbols across the canvas to create geometric patterns that read like reliefs. As a result, what would have otherwise been a flat 2-dimensional figurative work evolved into a more complex expression. Her incorporation of sculptural processes invokes an exquisite and compelling methodology to represent meta-dimensional, ecstatic, and transcendental states of consciousness.

Her latest series, Traces of My Spirit, exemplifies Casey’s dedication to the evolution of her practice. This body of work employs new processes and materials, including collage, mosaic tile, glitter, rhinestones, and mica flakes. The reflective, shimmering quality of the materials a rms the nuanced kinship that African people across the diaspora have with the spiritual presences, guides, and ancestors that walk with us. Through a review of Casey’s work, we are reminded that Black lives have always been sacred; the miracle of our survival in this realm is our ability to commune with and be renewed by the ancestral energies that live on through us.

Casey takes what she has learned from the previous series' experimental processes and provides vibrant vantages in Traces of My Spirit that encourage our earnest contemplation.