When the Sun Goes Down

Hunter Shackelford's Solo Exhibition

February 18th - March 6th

Flagg Building, Gallery 7 (through the student lounge)

500 17th St NW #7, Washington, DC 20006

Gallery hours: Wed. - Sat. 1pm - 5pm

When the Sun Goes Down captures the violent contradictions, tragic complexities, and melodic pain of what it means to be Black and suicidal. Suicide haunts the world, and the world haunts the suicidal. For Black people, though, there is no distinction between state-sanctioned M**der and the desire to jump. Through haunting visual narratives of Black experiences with suicide, popular culture imagery, and historical archives — When the Sun Goes Down illustrates poetic allusions of sundown towns, seeking relief from the daylight terrors of antiblackness, and the desire to never wake up again in a world that only makes you tired for being Black.

The artworks include experimental films of figurative and lyrical forms represented across time, place, and space, depicting Black American suicidal, homicidal, and apathetic embodiments. There is no world where Black suicide is without the assumption of state-facilitation, and no world where state-violence is not imbued with indictments of failure-to-survive. With references to Set It Off, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Juice, and Marlon Riggs — the stories, fictional and nonfictional, of Blackness struggling with the desire to live, sustain, endure, and die are choreographic to the political reality that suicide is an im/possibility and seemingly, the last and first resort of what it means to be Black.

In the words of Toni Morrison, “Jazz music was not originally for anyone but its players. It was always clear what its painful sources were. And yet it does what art is supposed to do - it makes another thing possible. This is how I want my work to be - a private thing for public consumption.” When the Sun Goes Down is my private thing for public consumption, it is my most private and vulnerable thing because I am my audience, the subject, the object, the voyeur, and the narrator of being Black with a desire to disappear. This work, my work, is shared to intervene in the silence, the architected loneliness, and the vanished stories of those who are sometimes, and always, glad when the sun goes down.

Hunter Shackelford (they) is a Black multidisciplinary artist, independent scholar, death worker, and bioethicist based in Virginia. As a mixed media storyteller, writer, painter, and filmmaker, they are known for using incendiary motifs of Blackness, gender, fatness, suicide, and death. Their work centers the politics of Black insurgency, Black mortality, Black feminist ethics, and ugliness as world-ending. Learn more about Hunter’s work at HunterAshleigh.com.

What if we didn’t make suicide spectacular? What if we didn’t make Black life revolutionary?

What if suicide didn’t always need to be understood? What if suicide didn’t need to be explained exclusively by oppression as if it has no lineage before they trafficked our flesh?

What if we didn’t try to “prevent” or “save” anyone, but rather committed to care without expectation of outcomes? What if we didn’t try to end the antiblack world under the speculation that Black people would still desire to live?

What if suicide was politically understood as a mundane possibility and reality for a world that is so unbearably antiblack, so plagued with architected suffering, so drowned by what cannot be undone?

Mundane as in uninteresting... because suffering can be as humdrum as a rainy day, or as quotidian as being harassed by the police.

Mundane, as in fuck you; as in no reason, no logic, just vibes.

Mundane as counterrevolutionary; as endurance, as indifference.

Mundane as autonomy, as choice, as volition, as sentience.

Mundane as insanity, as medical history, as generational trauma, as comorbidity, as medicated equilibrium, as no signs, as no note, as just because.

Mundane as Black.

Because we are never anything else. Our history, our present, our future is marked – swallowed by death, decay, and undoing. Our pain is Black. Our rope is Black. Our gun is Black. Our why is Black. Our why not is Black.

To connect with or find more of Hunter Shackelford’s work, go to HunterShackelford.com.

Host or Publisher The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at The George Washington University