Manifest a video piece created with found and filmed footage, highlights throughlines of my maternal lineage, and connects my personal biography to larger histories and perceptions of Black women through the format and ritual of a tarot reading. The content and format directly connect this video to my series of small works on paper based on the tarot deck, “Manifesting Paradise,” but the title holds a double meaning. A manifest is also the list of cargo carried on a ship which in the context of Black history clearly points not just to items, but also to ancestors carried across the middle passage. Like the “Manifesting Paradise” series, the video is an exploration of the endurance, permanence, and resonance of ideas, perceptions, and imagery across the continents and through generations.

The piece starts with a short poetic narration showing only my two hands preparing for the experience; filing fingernails, burning sage, and lighting candles. I identify my two hands as the most prominent likeness passed down through my maternal lineage from my grandmother to my mother to myself, setting up the premise of matriarchal influence. The focus on hands centers the physical labors of the women before me specifically referencing my grandmother's background as a beautician and later a nurse. The video then leads into “readings” that reveal plantation landscapes, swamps, oceans, rituals, interviews, and film and TV clips featuring Black women entertainers such as Dorothy Dandridge, Maya Angelou, Eartha Kitt, Hattie McDaniel, Josephine Baker, and Nina Simone. Sometimes these clips exist within larger landscapes, and other times the disparate clips seem to talk to each other. It eventually ascends into a cacophony of overlapping dialogue, increasing the anxiety and complexity of the voices presented and internalized for Black women. There are moments of quiet amongst tropical landscapes, but their placement next to or within the constructed context of tourist footage, plantation scenes, or Hollywood sets calls into question the true serenity of these moments. It ends with the ritual that reverses the tarot reading setup, clearing away the remnants in preparation for the next experience.

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ABOUT THE SHOW at OCHI (Feb-April 2023):

To Learn The Dark features new tapestries, large-scale collage works, and a video installation that build on Tarver’s interest into the multitudinous nature and invisibility of Black women, these artworks consider darkness as space, identity, and a tool to embrace the possibilities of freedom, joy, and growth. To Learn The Dark references bell hook’s Belonging: A Culture of Place (1990). Part autobiography, part critical theory, hooks charts a non-linear course toward a fully realized sense of place, which she calls “darkness:”

Daddy Jerry always tried to get his grandchildren to come out in the pitch dark ‘to learn the dark’—to learn its comforts and solace. We can do that and learn to be comfortable in the darkness and beauty of our skin. No one can take that spirit of belonging away. 

Enslaved Americans escaped under the cover of night via the Underground Railroad, but hunting and leisure were also safer under the stars. The mysterious and moody rooms of tarot readers are often dark, creating an ambiance for a theatrical suspension of disbelief and shrouding a querent from distraction. While the origins of tarot are murky, Tarver’s ongoing research embraces a rich tradition of artists—Leonora Carrington, Betye Saar, Niki de Saint Phalle—making work that imagined new worlds and iconographies to circumvent strategies of oppression. Three of Tarver’s tarot cards—Lovers (2022), World (2021), and Death (2022)—take the form of embroidered and embellished tapestries. Tarver’s use of tarot is informed by historical and contemporary healing practices, including the acknowledgment of trauma inflicted on generations of Black women in pre-industrialized medical spaces as well as a holistic understanding of healing as both medical and cosmetic—Tarver was deeply influenced by her grandmother, who was a beautician and a nurse.

Tarver’s collage works depict otherworldly protagonists poised in darkness, surrounded by tropical or swampy frondescence. A continuation of a previous series, these collages reconsider Black archetypes such as the tropical seductress or the voodoo priestess. Figures and foliage are assembled from hand-painted, cut paper pieces that imperfectly fit together, revealing white paper edges in contrast against of ink-pooled, oil slick rainbow gradients affixed to dark stained wood substrates.

Deftly shifting from collage to montage, Tarver’s video work features a tabletop view of a tarot reading projected onto a black velvet surface. Tarver’s hands energetically smudge the space then deal a deck of her own creation. Audio of tarot readings slip into anecdote and back again as cards are flipped to reveal portals into the slipstream of archived moving images—some cards spotlight groundbreaking performers like Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, Carmen Miranda, and Hattie McDaniel, while others provide clips from documentary films and contemporary real estate videos of former plantations currently on the market.

In a 2021 interview published in conjunction with her solo exhibition at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Tarver observes that “her generation’s search for omens is related to a mistrust in institutions that destabilized futures we were promised” citing that “the idea of covert meanings and hidden messages is a tradition that survived and evolved through the middle passage and cultural genocide.” To Learn The Dark mirrors strategies of interpretation and reflection required of any tarot or healing practice—parts are liberated from wholes, stories unmoored from timelines, individuals extracted from systems of oppression—just as the illustrated destruction of The Tower clears a path for new foundations.

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