Midwest
Spotlight Artist
AJMAL 'MAS MAN' MILLAR
Midwest
Artist Statement
I am a self-taught contemporary visual artist and mas man (carnival costume designer). My work includes mixed-media sculptural works that combine collage, painting, repurposed material, scrap metal, performance, and photography interrogating notions of cultural heritage, sexual and gender identity, and ritual practices as a first-generation African American Black queer man born to Trinidadian immigrants.
Currently, I am working on a collection of works engaging the Yoruba cosmological concept of Chi and its existence in everything, alive or inorganic. I create amalgamations of found objects and scraps of steel combined with encaustic. Inspired from my carnival technique of “bending,” Afrofuturism, and Afro Surrealism, I have an opportunity to express my emotions and thoughts as experienced in the various environments I collect from and exist in. My welding is drawing in space to depict the transcendent properties in masquerade. My goal is to contextualize a queer Blackness rarely experienced through imagination, invention, and the investigation of dreams, magic, and ritual.
Currently, I am working on a collection of works engaging the Yoruba cosmological concept of Chi and its existence in everything, alive or inorganic. I create amalgamations of found objects and scraps of steel combined with encaustic. Inspired from my carnival technique of “bending,” Afrofuturism, and Afro Surrealism, I have an opportunity to express my emotions and thoughts as experienced in the various environments I collect from and exist in. My welding is drawing in space to depict the transcendent properties in masquerade. My goal is to contextualize a queer Blackness rarely experienced through imagination, invention, and the investigation of dreams, magic, and ritual.
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