JAMIE ROBERTSON - EXPOSURE INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL

Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas is an autobiographical examination of my family history through documentary photography and the family archive. The ‘Home Place,’ the land my family has owned for generations, is the site of my creative practice. This landscape filled with its own folklore such as stories of an axe that becomes a lightning rod, Bibles opened to Psalms 91 in every room and people transforming into snakes; inform my photographic eye. The mental images they conjure are the foundations of my work and the beginning of my understanding of the African retentions present within my family.

Time is folded as past and present intersect through my pairing of photographs from my family archive with my own documentation of the Home Place. This intersection of time is greatly influenced by Bântu-Kôngo expressions of the universe through the ideogram Dikenga dia Kongo; a symbol and philosophy of life cycles. Through the use of this living and active cosmology of the ancestors, Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas mediates on the Home Place as a Black landscape in rural Texas; centering around the union of my maternal great-grandparents. The enduring memory of my ancestors serves as the beginning of a personal formation of ancestral concepts of place, time, and the sacred.

BIOGRAPHY

Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator from Houston, Texas. She earned a BA in Art and MFA in Studio Art with a concentration in photography and digital media from the University of Houston. She also holds an MS in Art Therapy from Florida State University. She is a former recipient of the American Art Therapy Association ‘Pearlie Roberson Award’ and Red Bull Arts Microgrant. Robertson is also one half of the podcast, Where I See Me, which examines the presence of Black and Brown people in comics and media. 

Her creative practice is rooted in the recollection of the personal and collective histories of the African Diaspora; with a particular interest in the Gulf South. Her work was featured in FORECAST 2021: SF Camerawork’s Annual Survey Exhibition, The Wheaton Biennial _final_final_FINAL, and Where We Are at Art League Houston. Her photobook Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, TX was published in December 2020 with Fifth Wheel Press. She currently works as a Lecturer at Sam Houston State University.