by Alani Nelson

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 o er 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

beholding both black aliveness and a black ethic of relation.” ¹ With this in mind, Traces of My Spirit suspends reality in favor of something almost tangible, almost actualized.

Investigating the gap between the ancestor and the friend, Casey’s work angulates in the transformational space between that which is mortal and the òrìsàs. Closing in on the void that separates the spiritual and the actual, Casey situates the audience in an environment for the contemplation and veneration of self and community. That alchemical force bonding the human body and its defied form can be referred to as Àsẹ. Defined by Roland Abiodun as,

The identification, activation, and utilization of the innate energy, power, and natural laws believed to reside in all animals, plants, hills, rivers, natural phenomena, human beings, and òrìsà…that divine essence in which physics, metaphysics, and art blend to form the energy or life force activating and directing socio-political, religious and artistic processes and experiences.”²

¹ In Black Aliveness, the Poetics of Black Being, Kevin Quashie p. 4

Traces of My Spirit works to bring Àsẹ to form. Through her rendering of gods of the present Casey embodies that reconstructive, new world making quality of Àsẹ as it, “imbues sound, space, and matter with energy to restructure existence, transform the physical world and also control it.”³ Envisioning the subjects of these portraits as something after or beyond human life o ers us the space to consider a reality where the highest version of self becomes actualized.

The adorned gods of Casey’s new world inhabit this burgeoning mythology that does not hesitate to recognize the godliness in humanity. Considering Casey as the storyteller and record keeper, these works become our contemporary archive, a record synchronized with the ebbs and flows of the black experience.

What could we leave at the altars of the living and the loved?

² Abiodun, Rowland. “Àse: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art.” Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 24, no. 4, Brill, 1994, pp. 309–22 3 Ibid.