Library Street Collective is happy to current Inward Cartography: Self of Selves, Basil Kincaid’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Identified for intricate textile works spanning quilting and embroidery, Kincaid usually explores the ability of motion, intention, and the potential for radical transformation by way of a spectrum of works that navigate summary and narrative modalities.
Rejecting clear categorization, Kincaid’s observe underscores the expansiveness of notion and the physique—each in non secular and digital realms. Crafted throughout continents, from the artist’s studio in St. Louis to Ghana and again, these fiber vignettes depict the emotional defragmentation of going through suppressed emotions and rewiring one’s societal, familial, and self-selected programming. Kincaid begins with drawing, then scanning and manipulating the work in Photoshop earlier than embroidering the picture and stretching it over bars very similar to a portray. Every sew carries an echo of private historical past, cultural reminiscence, and a need to fix the intangible.
Within the artist’s newest physique of labor, Kincaid adopts an aerial perspective—a metaphorical 30,000-foot view—charting inside terrains as in the event that they have been bodily landscapes. Ridges, valleys, and meandering rivers emerge by way of dynamic compositions the place colour and line act as conduits for emotion. These summary maps doc ephemeral experiences, capturing the shifting contours of selfhood and the blind spots left by private upheavals. The cyclical dialogue between the tangible and the digital mirrors the complicated interaction of our identities throughout these intersecting realms.
Kincaid’s work turns into each a mirrored image and a information, charting a path by way of self-exploration, resilience, and the continual technique of turning into. On this manner, the exhibition is as a lot an inward journey as it’s an outward expression of mapping the unseen. Influenced by artists resembling Anni Albers and Alma Thomas, and drawing inspiration from pure phenomena, meteorology, cosmic patterns, and digital aesthetics, Kincaid’s work is additional enriched by the writings of Octavia Butler, Legacy Russell, and Salvatore Quasimodo. Via this confluence of visible and literary references, the artist affords a multilayered narrative that bridges the ancestral with the modern, and the corporeal with the cosmic.
Basil Kincaid: Inward Cartography: Self of Selves is on view by way of Might 21, 2025 at Library Road Collective.
