NEW YORK, NY.- Nicola Vassell Gallery is presenting Moses Sumney: Blackalachia, a feature length performance film and photographic series created by the artist in the North Carolina stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains during the summer of 2020. Sumney’s auteurial debut highlights issues at the center of his interdisciplinary practice, including non-binary thinking, isolation, emotional introspection and historical Black cultural influence.
The film's title cites the relationship between Blackness and the Appalachian region, and the forced severance of the two, on which Sumney elaborates, “There is a history of Black people in Appalachia, there is a history of Black music being the foundation of bluegrass and country. There is a history of migration into and out of Appalachia. I’m so deeply invested in a reintegration into nature.” This sincere contemplation results in “a performance piece about performance, framed by the gradual passage of the day into blue-black night.”
Blackalachia is accompanied by a series of photographs, echoing the celestial tenor of the film, capturing the sublime North Carolinian landscape and include lyrical self-portraits as well as documentary vignettes. The film is a ruminative concert performed outdoors that serves as his latest album. Released in conjunction with the film, the album is aptly titled Live From Blackalachia. Just as Sumney’s musical work radiates between genres, his artistic practice employs performance, photography, and dance to evoke contemplative, grandiose, and ethereal environments.
Blackalachia was released virtually in December 2021 and premiered at the Perez Art Museum Miami; Nicola Vassell Gallery is thrilled to debut it in New York.
Born in California and raised between Ghana and Southern California, Moses Sumney is a multidisciplinary storyteller, singer, writer, and artist. Since emerging in 2014 with a self-released cassette EP, he has ridden waves of word-of-mouth praise, arresting visuals, and dynamic live performances alongside forebears like Sufjan Stevens, James Blake, and Solange. The artist’s 2017 debut album Aromanticism topped the end-of-year lists of tastemaker hubs like Bandcamp, the New York Times, NPR, and Pitchfork. It explored themes of solitude and lovelessness. In 2019, Sumney received a SXSW award for his music video work and was awarded a Macdowell Fellowship. In 2020, his first published essay, "Stateside Statelessness," appeared in Fight of the Century (Simon & Schuster), an immigration-centric anthology edited by Ayelet Waldman and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon. Sumney's 2020 sophomore double album græ has received top marks from Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, to name a few. Described as a "conceptual patchwork about greyness," it's his first work to be released since he relocated to North Carolina from Los Angeles.
