Won’t You Call Me By My Name

The four artists in this group show alter space throughout Maxon Mills tower to explore issues of race, identity, and presence.

Multimedia artist and photographer Azikiwe Mohammed makes work that straddles the line between playful exuberance and serious social commentary. His installation tells a straightforward tale of a day spent, of time spent, and hopes to generate a space in which the futures, present, and various pasts of the people represented within can meet our current timeline and provide a look at what is happening on the left and right for those that tend to look too long in the center.

Corinna Ray’s work plays with histrionic versions of memory: in her installation, lavish, Proustian carpets and other excesses of 90s comfort play nicely with the less-than-nice trappings of our collective histories. Joseph Lazaro Rodriguez’s work could, reductively, be described as “queering architecture.” But his environments also explore, with an uplifting wonder, the parallel joys that accompany traumas. Finally, Phoebe Wang’s audio work explores what it feels like to be the Other in a space, and provides emotional context for the enormous burden Otherness puts on individuals in our country. She asks, “Why choose to keep going in a world not built for you?”