line-medicine, line-prayer
Pono Asuncion
In this exhibition, Pono shares a collection of drawings made with black ink on paper. While Pono’s artistic practice ranges across mediums, black ink on paper emerges as a primary mode of expression and imagination. Pono’s father Kiwa’a, who became an ancestor when Pono was very young, left behind drawings in the physical world, allowing Pono to find connection to their father through the lines that Kiwa’a created on newsprint decades before Pono existed. Pono explores how line can be used as a worldbuilding tool.
These drawings spring from the question that guides Pono’s imagination and creative exploration: what might it mean to descend from ancestors who once called a faraway world home? What might it mean if Pono imagines their own hand and pen can be a mode of ancestral transmission of knowledge? If we cannot recover lost knowledge, can we imagine new knowledge?
Challenging dichotomies between known/unknown, history/myth, and imagination/reality, these drawings explore the landscapes, beings, architecture, lore, language, and sciences of Ta’oli, an imagined world full of all that the artist knows and does not know, a world of rainforests and red rocks and three suns.
Through methods of narrative world building that contribute to an evergrowing universe, Pono explores what it means to be an Indigenous person alienated from their cultures and peoples, what it means to be a child of many diasporas, and at the same time, someone who practices healing autonomy in the creation of new mythology as a response to intergenerational grief and the disruption of the passage of knowledge.
About the Artist
Pono (b. 1996, ze/they) is a self- and community-taught multimedia and interdisciplinary Maker, Storyteller, and Culture Bearer. Ze is of several diasporic lineages. What they know: they are of Kanaka people whose land is currently annexed by the imperial forces of the united states of america. They are of Taino and Samtoy rebels and rebellions. They are of indigenous peoples of Benin and West Togo. Colonialism continues to disrupt the passage of much knowledge beyond this, except that Ze is of the Asuncions—brown, sturdy, wild-haired, hot-blooded cryptids who collect tiny things, sing, play ki ho’alu, talk story, & take turns inventing worlds. Pono is based in Bdeóta Othúŋwe, close to the shores of Wíta Tópa.
Alongside ze’s siblings, Pono continues their father Kiwa’a’s work of continuing their ancestors’ work: alchemizing intergenerational grief into intergenerational creativity, knowledge, and story. Ze works with found wooden boards, cardboard, sketchbook scraps, Little Free Library books, office supplies, ink, acrylics, fountain pens, children’s art supplies, and digital painting. Ze creates paintings, drawings, comics, puzzles, games, books, illustrations, zines, collages, animations, poetry, fiction, music, and video art, through a combination of improvisation, experimentation, and world-building. Pono plays with worldmaking, mindfulness, knowledge and language invention, imaginary forms, interpersonal and ancestral memorymaking, and experimentation with line, color, form, medium, and process. Ze creates work through the lens of their identities as a brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, autistic, ADHD, disabled daydreamer. Rather than speak on their experience explicitly, ze aims to create things that evoke familiarity and strangeness, orientation and disorientation. In doing so, Pono asserts agency over ze's narrative and turns their Making toward undoing dominant ideas of what is and isn’t possible.