STATEMENT
My ongoing practice encompasses interdisciplinary installation art, hand-sewn fabric assemblage, performance and socially engaged community ritual. As a yogi and artist, it is through my Art practice that I began to develop a modern sense of the spiritual anchored in archetypal female power. Probing the archetypal realm for intersectional, intergenerational and ancestral healing, my installations, wearables and happenings are an Art form bloated with the genital poetry of the Goddess. A multifaceted practice dedicated to the resurgence of the archetypal Great Goddess and Dark Feminine, one aim of my work is restoring to sacred status women’s genitalia and symbols of fertility.
My textile works are hand-sewn, fabric based sculptural pieces made from recycled materials that have multiple uses as ritual talismans, wearables, ecstatic birth blankets, dreamcatchers and traveling altars. Functioning as would yantras - they crystallizing my relatedness to all that is, the woven, devouring nature of reality. More immersive installations become experimental spaces for ritual, play and performance for creatives inclined to the sacred arts. Unorthodox Yogis blending spiritual practice with indigenous intuited herstories, hip hop artists fusing the rap cipher and Hindu kirtan - mother tongues - based on the power of call and response.
This work is based in my long-term, active engagement cross-pollinating the languages of embodied astro-feminism, yoga, folk-mythologies, the shamanic impulse and holistic hip hop. As a femme, able-bodied, racially mixed women with white privilege, I acknowledge my privilege to pick and choose what aspects of Blackness I shoulder. Ancient practices rooted in traditions of the greater African Diaspora fold into my practice as agents of healing; accounting for Africa as the cradle of humanity and American popular culture and music as quintessentially Black.
Disavowing the culture of white women’s body-dysmorphic toxic positivity and competition that has throttled the expansion of Yoga in the West, I continue to imperfectly explore in my work the true nature of ancient earth-based wisdoms reemerging within Hip Hop, Yoga and Art. Tracing back to when India and Africa made up one supercontinent. In the realm of its Queen Mothers, the yogic Lotus symbol of light into dark “Heaven on Earth” was a symbol of fertility, a living metaphor for the perpetual cycle of life, death and renewal.
ABOUT KATIE
Katie Cercone Or Nah is an artist, scribe, priextexx and spiritual gangsta hailing from the blessed coast. Cercone has performed or shown work in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Dallas Contemporary, Momenta Art, C24 Gallery, Changjiang Museum China, Dodge Gallery and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. In 2015 she was a J.U.S.F.C. Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo and was awarded the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice with her feminist collective Go! Push Pops. Cercone is adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts where she teaches GENDER TROUBLE in the Visual & Critical Studies Department. A pioneer of Hip Hop Yoga Katie was awarded the Franklin Furnace Award for performance art in 2020.
PRESSDazed, MILK, Interview, Japan Times, Huffington Post, ART 21, Hyperallergic, PAPER, Art Fag City, Washington Post & Art Net TV among others
CURATORIAL
Momenta Art, KARST (UK), Cue Art Foundation, Local Project, NurtureArt & The West Chelsea Festival of Art
PUBLICATIONS
ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture Mag, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Utne Reader, N.Paradoxa.
Follow her on Instagram @parvati_slice
@midheavenornahBook a Yoga or Astro-Oracle session HERE
