JAVA JONES

Dats Real Cute (2019) inaugurated my exploration and staging of “quiet images,” a term borrowed from media theorist and professor Tina Campt in her seminal text Listening to Images (2017).

So beguiled by the act/ion of hair braiding I witnessed in my family’s homes as a child, yet restricted from playin with the hair because I was a boi—a boi born to a single, Southern Baptist mama exclusively, importantly—I began interrogating the possibilities of being moved by familial objects u’r restricted from touching unless u’r facilitating its disposal or destruction. Here, a plank of stiffened kanekalon braiding hair, reclining on the wall, mirrors the stasis of my (non)interaction with it as a child and gestures to the family portraits on Granma’s wall that were always beyond reach. Perhaps not the hair solely, but the event surrounding this object and being able to witness its engagement, pierced my attention to make way for the disruptive innocence commonly groomed by a child’s imagination for diversion: how can I make somethin and someone look and feel good and have fun, simply? Braiding hair held space for kinship, commune, and capital: a triad through which beauty emerges or dies.

The alarm and beauty that met on mama’s head, in the form of a backward, sideways neck thrust and raised brow nearly ensued any gratuitous interaction with women who dared reached to touch her hair, to test their perception of / amazement by / desire for her freshly permed and imbricated layers of hair : “U can look, but don’t touch.” Put more sternly, “it’s mine.” Touching was a second way to “see,” to enhance sensorial experiences of perception.

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