How does the past determine the future? What will become of me if I am left to imagine, rather than to know, my history?
Justin Carney is a photographer and professor at Colorado State University. His work focuses on his heritage, family and identity, and in his new exhibition, “Full of Dreams,” Carney addresses his own questions about his identity that have been lost in history, through his creativity.
“I question what traumas, griefs, pains and joys get passed down through generations and how this lineage has shaped me,” Carney wrote in his artist statement.
Carney was born and raised in Baltimore. When his grandmother passed away in 2011 from lung cancer, Carney set out to try and understand his generational traumas as well as joys, using his career in art to further this exploration.
“The main trauma is the not knowing — not knowing the history,” Carney said. “My grandmother’s kids don’t know much about my grandmother’s past; I can’t even say I know too much about my own mother’s past.”
The not knowing, the unspoken traumas and the passed down joys: This is what is reflected in Carney’s exhibition. Where does our heritage begin, what is told to us by varying perspectives and what aspects do we make up as we go?
Carney communicated that feeling to his audience by creating a photography style that examines what surrounds us to then find more. How would one portray that? Carney developed postproduction effects that allow his photographs to mirror an X-ray. This creative decision was inspired by his grandmother’s chest X-ray taken of the lung cancer that she ultimately passed away from. The X-ray is also shown alongside his photographs in the gallery.
In addition, the photographs are accompanied by a text element, allowing the audience to participate in this journey of generations as well. Questions were written out for the audience to reflect on their own uncertainties with the wordplay and written texts, creating a circular, never-ending gallery experience: What lies beneath the surface? Who will I become? Who am I? Who are we?
This journey is just starting for Carney, who holds onto details, stories and family memories as one of his only ways to continue the project.
“A lot of the things have to be made up, (like) using context clues as best as I can within historical records not always pertaining to my family,” Carney said.
“I am Black — this is from a Black perspective, but I don’t think it only speaks to Black experiences. … This is about Black history, my history and my family’s history, but it’s a search for history. It’s a searching for people; it’s a searching for the past, searching for an understanding. And I feel like everyone is searching for that.” -Justin Carney, photographer
As the exhibit opens, Carney said that this is just the beginning.
“I’m thinking this project is probably going to take, like, 10 years,” Carney said. “In terms of where it will go, how it will develop, I actually have no clue. … Things continue to change as I find new things, learn things or don’t learn things.”
Carney not only sees the project taking new forms as it develops, as it began that way.
“I knew I had a starting point within the landscapes, and I’ve been wanting to do landscape photography for a long time,” Carney said. “But even in that starting point, you can see that people start to come in in certain images. At first, I was going down the route of, ‘There are going to be absolutely no people,’ and then my uncle recently passed away, … and things changed, and maybe people need to be in it and take on an ominous form.”
While tracing his history, Carney was able to track a part of his family heritage, without definite certainty, to the Quander family, believed to be the one of oldest African American families documented in America. The family was enslaved in Maryland and Virginia, including at former President George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. The difficulty of finding the missing pieces and trying to bridge the gaps is a shared experience for many families whose ancestry dates back to periods of enslavement.
“It makes me sad, and it makes a lot of people sad,” Carney said. “I mean, the mysteriousness is cool, but at the same time, I just want to know, and I can’t know, and now I’m left to make stuff up.”
Using photography as a medium is symbolic within itself, showing physical imagery of Carney’s history, family and home — creating something that he himself does not have of his ancestors.
“For some people, it’s like the world didn’t even exist before now,” Carney said. “But for other people, the world has existed for a long time.”
This exhibit is just that: a creation of the world Carney has existed in. He’s hoping to open that door for viewers to ask questions about their own ancestry, what’s been passed down through their family and what is new.
“I am Black — this is from a Black perspective, but I don’t think it only speaks to Black experiences,” Carney said. “This is about Black history, my history and my family’s history, but it’s a search for history. It’s a searching for people; it’s a searching for the past, searching for an understanding. And I feel like everyone is searching for that.”
Carney’s gallery is being displayed in the CSU Visual Arts Building’s Directions Gallery through Oct. 17 as well as the opening reception. His artist talk will commence at 4:30 Sept. 5 in Visual Arts Room F101.
Reach Ruby Secrest at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
