Komikka Patton is a 2D media artist based in New York City. She uses ballpoint pen, ink, paper and assorted printmaking techniques to create works that are centrally based on the human condition, each illustration and print tells a different story, reflecting life, death, and the tribulations of characters that are symbolic of the stereotypical Black identity. She has been featured on Hyperallergic and in Botticelli Magazine. A solo show at The Ne’-Na Contemporary Art Space in Chiang Mai, Thailand as well as various galleries in NYC and Columbus, Ohio. She is the winner of the Tolesdet drawing prize and the May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Scholarship. She has obtained her BFA in Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art & Design and a MFA from New York University.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Drawing on Afrofuturist themes, my motifs relate to Black motherhood and motherships. My work cycles maternity and explores comprehensive visions of futuristic Utopias/Dystopias that converge at the intersection of awareness, power, and emancipation; anchoring them with direct relevance to contemporary social issues in ways that communicate Black women’s participation in, and alienation from the larger world. Using drawing, printmaking, and collage gives the opportunity to tap into the world of the fictional, surreal, mythical, and spiritual. The archetypes in the work came from a street market on a trip to South Africa and their births ignited questions of my ancestry, self, having a single black mom, my fear of motherhood, and my own mortality. The drawings speak to the forward motion of possibility for Black women and invite the audience to arrive at many possibilities of a future through all pathways, even the possibility of simply existing. Healing through Afrofuturistic Possibility, Time-Travel, Quantum Physics, and Hope.
A slight divergent from the Mother project, my most contemporary work show reflections of myself in projections of other Black women. A response project, that touches on futurism, transhumanism, mythology, and storytelling. An introduction into portals to see into possible futures and or collapse space-time into realms in which these Black women are gatekeepers to all that lies within. This series almost a feminist intervention, liberating the Black female figure from her traditional duties and her secondary status. As one to be gazed at and placed in the realms of Other, these portraits convey intimate moments of self-reflection, self-awareness, and ecstasy. This work [entitled, Gatekeepers,] explores personal, cultural, familial, and communistic cycles of experience and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive using artistic and holistic methods of healing. All the women in these works are artists, sharing recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories through their own means and power.
Part African Queens part cyborgs, each collage belongs to no one time or place. Figures that are invariably stately, resilient, and self-possessed. They announce authority and autonomy. These works are meant to elevate women to positions of power imbuing them with infectious confidence in who they are. Reimagined in a motif common to western sci-fi. This mash-up of traditional and futuristic allows Black women to not only exist in the future as more than what they were allowed to be in the past but also allows the Black women to world build.” – Komikka “Martian” Patton
