黑料不打烊

Let Them Roam Freely is a two-person exhibition presenting newly commissioned projects and recent work by Hong Hong and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell that focus on the creation of portals through physical movement. A portal is a bridge, a gateway, a tunnel to a different time and space. Hong鈥檚 and Terrell鈥檚 respective practices evoke gateways linked to personal, communal, and cultural histories. They use performance-based methods to embody and document their passage, resulting in large-scale work on paper for Hong and photography and sound for Terrell.

The commissioned projects were formed on-site in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven. In January 2022, Hong enacted an experimental approach different from her traditional method of papermaking, which is usually conducted outdoors in the spring and summer months. She used NXTHVN鈥檚 gallery as her studio to make the paper indoors and employed a more tactile process that required her hands to layer the surface of the work. In February 2022, Terrell performed and composed new portals throughout Dixwell and its surrounding areas. Focused initially on the presence of Black history attached to specific locations and events throughout Detroit, such as Belle Isle, Terrell shifted to seeking out broader landscapes with Black leisure, life, and existence embedded into the environment.

Within Hong鈥檚 work, we witness the impressions left by her physical application of materials as an expression of relocation, specifically in terms of distance, time, and cultural shift from a place of origin. At the same time, Terrell presents the cultural aftermath of living in a Detroit shaped by the Great Migration by aligning the visible and absent presence of these histories in their search and documentation of portals. Through such different lived experiences, these two perspectives present the audience with nuanced personal expressions of the impact human dispersion has across land and through generations.