Description

Lehna Huie is a multi- disciplinary artist and cultural worker of Jamaican heritage born in New York City (1988). Huie works in painting, installation and video, centering themes of diaspora, memory and fragmentation. Her work is rooted in recovering evidence of her family’s ancestral legacies to better understand their lives and relationships. For Huie, this is a practice of creating her language for abstract storytelling. Comprising fabric, projections, textile scraps and everyday objects, her mixed media compositions integrate cultural symbols, treasured stories, and family photographs- piecing together iterations of her evolving story keeping ritual. Drawing from remnants of their vibrant and complex lives, Huie reinterprets their likeness through portraiture that embodies reflections of the multiplicities within her family dynamics. She is intrigued by liminal boundaries in truth, myth and imagination, uplifting the ways in which oral histories are passed down across generations. Huie's process is a means of tracing back to the source, illustrating diverse geographies of “home”, while in dialogue with notions of liberation, migration and decolonization. Huie is interested in uplifting stories of Black life to explore connections within the African Diaspora. Her work concentrates on themes such as the soul, non-linear time and remembrance, highlighting communications with her departed relatives and ancestral guides. Huie’s practice weaves together these personal narratives of city life with Pan African and Caribbean imagery to make the unseen realms–seen.