Ricky Weaver is an image-based artist from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her practice employs what she calls “The quantum ontology of images” as portals to elsewhere. She explores the idea of alternative modes of existence through themes of magical realism, the archive of the everyday, and dark sousveillance.
Weaver has participated in the Applebaum fellowship and Carr Center Independent Fellowship where she began her relationship with friend and mentor, Carrie Mae Weems. She has exhibited work in the 13th Annual Havana Biennale, Photographic Center Northwest, Page Bond Gallery, and more. She received her BFA in Photography from Eastern Michigan University in 2014 and an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2018. She has since worked as Part-time faculty in the photography departments at Wayne State University, Eastern Michigan University, and Washtenaw Community College.
This work renders moments when black women’s cultural and spiritual practices of community and care provide breadth and substance for creating spaces of leverage. These images locate a specific vernacular of facial expression and body language that can be traced back to the Middle Passage. This vernacular disrupts the problematic ways of archiving blackness and outsmarts surveillance technologies as such. The life that these images begin to imagine exists in a reality outside the constraints of social and political constructs.
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