"Ancestral Mirrors" Artist Talk with Shanequa Gay

From the venue:

Ancestral Mirrors

Ancestral Mirrors is a visual ritual- a speculative altar constructed from memory, lineage, and metaphysical presence. It is a world built from the shimmer of (re)memory, the weight of inherited objects, and the sacred act of stitching the past into the present.Drawing from her familial archives, Shanequa Gay conjures memory, mythology, multidimensional time, and ancestral lineage while blending Yoruba symbology and her indigenous heritage. Gay’s creates collage, textile textures, sculpture, and cosmic overlays that merge themes of her experiences in the American South, Black women epistemologies, erasure of the Lightning neighborhood, andher relationship to sacred sites such as Morris Brown College. Indigo represents a portal towards corporeal discourse and a mirror toreflect Gay’s ancestral layers. Spiritually indigo represents wisdom, insight, and connection to the unseen. It’s also associated with West African cultural rituals and evokes the cosmos, water, and memory, offering a fluid dimension where the personal and the ancestral intermingle. This portal represents a space where the living and the ancestral meet, where the visible and speculative collapse into one image. Ancestral Mirrorsis a mapping of the unseen. A collapse of the veil. It is the sacred act of looking back in order tomove forward, of standing in the now while reaching across time to touch the hand of an ancestor. This exhibition embodies ancestral voices, sacred rites, matrilineal care, Black femininity, our connection to the divine, and counter-narratives, that explore how we are shaped by both personal histories and collective cultural legacies passed down through generations. These mirrors reflect not just the past but the possibility of new futures.