Gherdai Hassell
Gherdai Hassell is a contemporary multimedia artist whose work is developed through a process of autoethnography, connecting her own experience and academic research to larger, cultural, historical, political meanings and understandings. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2013.
Exploring ideas about representation, perception, identity creation, and childhood, her vibrant collages capture and collect the gaze.
Her artwork is on permanent display in the Government Administration Building, Hamilton, Bermuda. She has consecutively showcased and auctioned her work in Tina Lawson’s Annual Wearable Art Gala in Los Angeles, CA. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Bermuda, USA, and China. Gherdai is currently an MFA candidate at the China Academy of Art.
Exploring ideas about representation, perception, identity creation, and childhood, her vibrant collages capture and collect the gaze.
Her artwork is on permanent display in the Government Administration Building, Hamilton, Bermuda. She has consecutively showcased and auctioned her work in Tina Lawson’s Annual Wearable Art Gala in Los Angeles, CA. She has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Bermuda, USA, and China. Gherdai is currently an MFA candidate at the China Academy of Art.
Gherdai works from an Afrofuturist and Afrocentric perspective saying, “Here, the black and brown body are seen as sacred and inviolable. I look to the past and across distances to investigate what constitutes individual or collective identity in an increasingly diasporic, culturally alienated and fractured world. I reimagine the ability to heal inter-generational traumatic inheritance, both past and future, creating deliberate living relationships with the materials themselves. This exploration reimagines the identities of enslaved Bermudians in a series of striking painted portraits inspired by historic slave registries discovered in the British colony, Bermuda, Archives.”
At Gherdai’s solo exhibition, I Am Because You Are at the National Gallery of Bermuda, the installation uses collage as a metaphor for past, present, and future. She says, “I use layered symbolism and historical, archival imagery throughout the work as both meditation and access point. Working with the art process in this way, I imagine and call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to bring to the forefront faces, bodies, stories, and spirits that have been often systematically erased from the dominant narrative.”
I Am Because You Are reclaims a shared history by reimaging lost identities and giving a voice back to those whose were stolen from the dominant narrative.
gherdaihassell.com
