Johnny Floyd - Child Be Free

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Image Credit: The Magician, 2024, 32 x 44 inches, India ink, watercolor, and cotton thread on archival paper, (Image from the Joanne Casullo Collection at the CSSR Archive)

Image Credit: The Magician, 2024, 32 x 44 inches, India ink, watercolor, and cotton thread on archival paper, (Image from the Joanne Casullo Collection at the CSSR Archive)

Johnny Floyd - Child Be Free

Smoyer Gallery

September 13 - December 8, 2024

Opening Reception September 13, 6-8pm

Johnny Floyd’s exhibition, “Child Be Free” explores our relationship with time and how we define ourselves within its bounds. Influenced by conversations with his grandfather, a theoretical physicist, Floyd delves into questions of purpose and identity, often through the lens of recursion theory, where repetition leads to revelation.

Through experimentation with paper, sewing, and digital manipulation, Floyd intertwines archival imagery with themes of ancestry and connection. Drawing inspiration from The Center for Studying Structures of Race’s project on naming unnamed enslaved individuals who contributed to Roanoke College's history, Floyd intertwines archival African-American vernacular photography from the Maurice Berger Memorial Archive and Library with themes of ancestry and connection. By utilizing the Black experience in the United States as an analogy for the constructs of time, his art aims to deconstruct and question the necessity of these constructs, inviting viewers to contemplate their own temporal identities.

*The Maurice Berger Archive and Library is housed within The Center for Studying Structures of Race at Roanoke College

In collaboration with the Center for Studying Structures of Race, funding for this exhibition is provided by the Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Center for Art at Roanoke College

Image Credit: The Magician, 2024, 32 x 44 inches, India ink, watercolor, and cotton thread on archival paper, (Image from the Joanne Casullo Collection at the CSSR Archive)

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