Sondra Perry
American, born 1986
couch and fern, GLITTER AND THE LION’S MANE
INV-1793
Sondra Perry
American, born 19862020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 1934, 1.8 Ga.
couch and fern, GLITTER AND THE LION’S MANE
Sondra Perry American, born 1986 →installation
Date
2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 1934, 1.8 Ga.
Medium
Sofa with video screen, fern, motorized barbershop chair, urethane, acrylic, glitter, iron, lion's mane mushrooms, polyethylene vinyl acetate, and single-channel video, color, sound; 28 min, 22 sec. continuous loop
Dimensions
Installation dimensions variable
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Arthur D. Collins Jr. and Sophia Shaw Acquisition Endowment Fund; Photography and Media Curatorial Discretionary Fund
In this installation, an upturned sofa displays a video shot from a moving car and accompanied by audio of Sondra Perry and psychotherapist Bola Shonubi talking. The two discuss the artist’s grandmother’s life in the Jim Crow South and Perry’s search for the land where her grandmother was a sharecropper. Throughout their conversation, they explore themes of aging, mortality, and Black generational trauma. The inclusion of a barbershop chair overgrown with lion’s mane mushrooms, which are thought to improve cogni-tion and combat aging, serves as a healing agent for the continued impact of the past on the present. Of the work’s many dates, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 indicate the years that different iterations of couch and fern, GLITTER AND THE LION’S MANE were installed before it arrived at this final form, and 1.8 Ga, or 1.8 billion years, corresponds with the age of a prehistoric fern species.
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