Ernest A. Bryant III is interested in the role played by art and artifacts in different cultures, and what it means for them to be appropriated or displaced. Exploring how images, objects, and rituals carry power, the artist describes his work as an attempt “to make sense of [the world] aesthetically, socially, spiritually.”
Self- Medication is an interactive sculpture made in the style of an early twentieth-century Kongo Nkisi figure. Mining the tradition of placing medicine inside the stomach and head of these powerful figures, a monitor has been placed into its belly. The return of the viewer’s gaze in this screen forces them to consider what they are bringing to the encounter. What does it mean to scrutinize an object which has been displaced from the cultural context on which it depends for its symbolic—and often sacred—power, and how does it operate as an activated, aesthetic-spiritual technology?
