Temporal Alchemy

Mission in Arts is excited to present ‘Temporal Alchemy’, a solo exhibition of paintings by D’Shon McCarthy. Temporal Alchemy explores the fleeting nature of time; where creation, destruction, and transformation shape identity. Rooted in an understanding of the past, the exhibition invites a conversation on the complexities of growth and change—examining how history, memory, and the self continuously evolve.

D’Shon’s work engages with experiences of liminality through the complicated generational materiality negotiated by black female embodiment.  Growing up in the small town of Salisbury, Maryland, D’Shon’s family dwindled in size and scope as they were isolated from her mother’s home country of Barbados. D’Shon discovered that her mother, born in June 1966, three months shy of when Barbados gained independence from Britain, entered a world marked by slavery and colonialism, her grandmother having worked on a sugarcane plantation and having her name, Luci (now Lucile), changed by the plantation owner. The fragmentation of family, as generations evaporate and regenerate into new black bodies has driven D’Shon to find an interest in representing the black figure in a tenuous two-dimensional world that displays the contingent fragility of their existence. 

These actions at the hands of the body, all fleeting and impermanent, led to D’Shon’s investigation of the “self”, as a constantly morphing and undefinable creature through ceaseless change and adaptation.  Through the process, a complicated temporal negotiation occurs between remembering history through the body, while situating the body as a speculative prototype for a future yet to come.  The result is a hauntology, the uncanny, fraught complexities to identity, that linger around the history of the black body as subject and object, resulting in a fleshy alchemy of hopes, anxieties, aspirations, memory, and memorial, attempting to escape a past that nonetheless remains hauntingly present as D’Shon’s fascination with the dead, her ancestors, speak to her. In exploring these ideas, she positions figures in peculiar settings that seem familiar, their actions carried out in a dream- like atmosphere filled with vibrancy and intensity. Comparing the scale of the self- portraits and neighboring symbolic objects allows for themes of the surreal to come forward in productively ambiguous ways. Tightly rendered areas representing the validity of the present as she makes her way through it trace the objectified representation of what the self knows as real and is contrasted by loosely, gestural depictions of the vague, haunting essence of the past, a distant memory. The abstraction of the body is D’Shon’s gateway to understanding the self as an object, simultaneously, the self as beyond objectifiable. 

The lessons gleaned from family and generational trauma are the keys to D’Shon’s artistic practice, and will therefore be the keys to her future endeavors regarding painting. The question of what her history looked like will allow D’Shon to create a bridge between the past, and present; Answering the question as to what came before her and how it allows me to draw conclusions about her identity.