Interdisciplinary Artist, Educator, and Researcher
Image courtesy of Clarendon Scholars’ Association, University of Oxford.
Christie Neptune is an Afro-Caribbean American interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. She received her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Art, Culture, and Technology and her BA from Fordham University in Visual Arts. Neptune's work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art Medellín (MAMM), Gagosian, Martos Gallery, Tilton Gallery, and the Queens Museum, amongst others. Her work is in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. In 2021, she was awarded the Prix Medeos for the presentation of her work at Art-O-Rama in Marseille, France. Her work has been widely discussed in publications such as 4 Columns, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Her numerous awards and residencies include Backslash at Cornell Tech fund, Light Work Artist-in-Residence, NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, Smack Mellon Studio Residency, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Fellowship, among others. In the Fall of 2024, Neptune began her doctoral research in fine arts at the University of Oxford. The working title of Neptune’s DPhil is Towards an African Cosmology: Marked (Black) Axiological Shifts within Representational Practice, generously supported by The Clarendon Fund in partnership with the Flora Welch Clarendon Scholarship at St Hugh's College, Oxford.
STATEMENT:
A performance. A dance. A gesture recorded with light. About. The want. To be. Filled. To Carry. To touch ground(s). Pulling days of yore into today. With my convictions, I carry the past and reimagine the fullness of time. Vessel. A constellation of memories. Wrapped in space.
Christie Neptune’s research examines the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive space. Through photography, moving image, and performance, she explores how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Critically aware of self, Neptune employs varying degrees of subjectivity to shift axes of language and power in cultural representation. Utilizing the values and semiotics of black culture, disparate industrial objects, the domestic, and the material properties of film, Neptune foregrounds phenomenological blackness, the intricate and wide-ranging dimensions of black inner life.
Neptune’s work draws from her lived experience in the American urban, mid-20th-century minimalist aesthetics in art and architecture, and black feminist theory. Through screen practice, assemblage, the varying schemes of relational aesthetics, and the marked conventions of visual culture, Neptune explores the disintegration of time, memory, and language. In Neptune’s practice, (re)animated objects and media meander a thin line between real and imagined space to foster new sensibilities of seeing and knowing. This intervention moves the camera’s gaze beyond temporal boundaries and spatial dimensions to enable the persistence of new knowledge formations across both dominant and marginal spatialities. As a material conduit within this schema, the body and framed objects channel the history(s) of yore, colliding the past and present to reimagine the fullness of time.