Travelin’ Mercies: Transits
Exhibition Dates: October 20, 2022 – March 26, 2023
Visas make possible the passing of boundaries, geographical and spatial, artificial and natural. While these lines may be crossed, the bounds of culture, identity, distance and otherness accompany our travels, meet us where we land. Seed Lynn has used story and story-working circles to enter communities as a listener and witness, less concerned with solving our mysteries than making them. But, how is that received in lands unknown? Where gaze prevails and listening takes effort? Can stories grant passage?
Travelin’ Mercies shares Lynn’s own tales of dragon passage, marking myths he’s had to face to be both black and well. Behind each image is a story, each story a mercy, granting Lynn new authority over his myth. ‘Mercies’ is as personal as it is openly spiritual, chronicling a path to self-permissioning, the many entrances and exits to and from safety, and the gifts that come when travel within meets travel without.
Transits is the second installation in Lynn’s signature series. It journeys past the gates of departures and arrivals, through the contours and temporalities of guesting, to declare ‘arriving’ as a solid state wherein meaning is made and minted. The surrender of those who leave and return differently is felt deeply in this work, which is more than a love letter to the well-sojourned. Images, arresting and honest, team with poems and proverbs to present viewers with maps to enduring treasure, proposing for some, travel as a means to being and becoming recognizably free.
About Seed Lynn
Culture worker, imagist, and digital storyteller, Seed Lynn, submits listening as a liberatory practice. Whether sensually, technically, or artfully applied, Lynn greets the lens as an altered state through which listening and witnessing make voice necessary. This listening invades his work, finds and frames subjects honestly and creates spaces where stories find students. Lynn’s own studies concern how we remember ourselves, how that memory is imaged, and how remembrance itself, in the face of an oppressor, is a cathartic and radical act of protest.
