Jhona Xaviera‘s ra 06h 45m 09s dec -16° 42′ 58″ is currently on view in Vernacular Glamour.
Vernacular Glamour brings together a cross-section of contemporary Latinx artists working with the visual vocabularies of camp, popular culture, high fashion, and baroque painting and architecture through vernacular idioms. Engaging the materials and forms of ball culture, advertising media, spiritual practices, and street art, the eight artists in Vernacular Glamour mobilize the artifice and exuberance of glamour to address the complexities of everyday life.
Jhona Xaviera is a multimedia performance artist and interdimensional chimæra who uses poetry, music, photography, video, and performance to create worlds that honor the divine, monstrous, and human multiplicities of the trans experience. They look to history, personal and collective, to ask questions about power. They look to the present, here and there, to ask questions about empathy. They look to the future, ours and theirs, to ask questions about desire. These alchemical elements come together to form ritually activated altars that act as catalysts for radical self love.
When the language they were given fails them, they choose to build a visual poetic realm purely out of the yearnings, skepticisms, and frustrations of my ancestors. Jhona is inspired by the centuries of marronage, ball room, radical uprising, queer theory, decolonial praxis, and Afro-Caribbean religion that contextualize their lifetime. They offer space for others to join them in embodying their inner child, their shadow self, their highest self, and seeking the communities that can hold them.
Jhona Xaviera’s ra 06h 45m 09s dec -16° 42′ 58″ can be viewed in Vernacular Glamour at the Kathryn Schultz Gallery until February 19, 2022. For more information, click here.
Jhona Xaviera | Vernacular Glamour Exhibiting Artist
Jhona Xaviera Fabian (they/she) is a Dominican-American, Boston-based multimedia chimæra who weaves together visual and performing arts into stories that embody the multiplicities of their Afro-Caribbean trans experience. They received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2020 and have infiltrated gallery, performance, research, and virtual spaces across the American east coast. As their muse, guide, and highest self, they channel Asyra: the many-faced goddess you may only wish to worship.
See more from Jhona Xaviera
Instagram: @jo.asxv
Website: www.jhonaxaviera.art