Clarion Vol. 4: Tiona Nekkia McClodden: MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY
In Conversation
Excerpt:
Simone White: When you do work that is tied to any kind of biographical element—thinking about autoethnography—people feel that, when you do that work, you have to give them access to your entire life.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden: MASK / CONCEAL /CARRY began with me trying to have a conversation with myself, asking, “What can I keep for myself? What am I going through in my life? What is my reality?”
I am not interested in creating a disturbance in the different spaces that I enter. When I’ve worked with someone else, I don’t have any recording device. I’m not writing notes. I’m talking to them. Then we work our way to this place where maybe I could get to the documentation.
But I do that with myself as well. When we did press for the show, The New York Times asked if they could bring a photographer to the gun range. And I said no, the interviewer is going to have to go through this process that I went through—you have to feel it in your body and do the recall. We’re not going to have a photographer be something that changes the dynamic of the space that I go to. Because this is my range and I’m still going to go here and I don’t want to talk about The New York Times being here, because that is going to disrupt what Philly does for me, which is create a place for me to be held.
And so with the exhibition, I like that I was able to keep a very significant process private. Though this publication gives more of a reveal of what the work presents.
