Time: 7 o’clock sharp
Location: Mini Bar, East Village

Over Butter Lane cupcakes, a glass of summer bubbly, and candlelight, East Village bred artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich shines. By the end of the night I’ve got the hiccups, a reading list, and a listening session in store. Here’s why for the rising Hunt-Ehrlich “mixed media” takes place both inside the exhibition space and in the bodegas beyond.

Legacy Russell: What would you say your focus is as a photographer? Wait…would you even self-define as a “photographer,” or is that just the easy way out when describing yourself to someone else? Better question: What’s your take on the work you do?

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich: My work is different from many photographers in that the medium is secondary to what I am trying to put out in the world, which is a complex understanding of black urban culture and public spaces. Maybe one day it will take the form of a feature-length film. At times the work takes the form of an essay on Little Haiti in Miami in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Port Au Prince, which was published by Studio Museum in Harlem; or a combination of both words and images such as the presentation I gave at the Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center this past April. Most frequently my work is mediated through photographs or video.

LR: How does video/how do motion pictures integrate themselves into your approach to taking pictures?

MHE: Right now I’m working on a video piece in collaboration with playwright Diane Exavier. The piece, which is being filmed on Gunhill Road in the Bronx and is called “Stay Close”, looks at the style of wearing rosaries, crosses and crucifixes on the street. It’s a style with Catholic roots but its significance mutates in the context of “the block.” It becomes about gold, diamonds and showing off how well you are doing to your community. At the same time it is also a token of luck and can stand for the wearer’s fears and sense of mortality, functioning as a symbolic or spiritual armor. It is an umbilical chord to family, mothers and grandmothers and children whom frequently give crosses as gifts. Certain gangs and “fresh crews” have adopted it as a way to identify fellow members. In many urban neighborhoods street corners are claimed by men, they are a stage for learning, enacting and perfecting masculinity. I once asked a kid why he was wearing four gold crosses around his neck at the same time; he said, “because I need that much luck.”

LR: What difference is there between having a woman like yourself behind the lens, controlling the image, versus, say, an Alex Prager? Or maybe like an…Elad Lassry? Or a Roe Ethridge?

MHE: Identity plays huge roles in photographers’ access and practice. The street, public spaces at night for instance are typically considered unsafe for women. I always refused to let the expectations of being a woman get in the way of photographs I want to make. While studying in Kingston, Jamaica I often would throw on a baseball cap and some baggy clothes and play myself off as male or at least androgynous to get images without having to deal with the harassment and intimidation one often experiences as a female on the street. I had a few scares while working on a project in Miami but instead of giving up I learned how to box and to protect myself. I think about what is expected of me as a woman and just have come to accept that an image is more important to me than fulfilling those expectations. There’s a lot of genius that comes from studio practice but right now I am too in love with the element of surprise encountered in public space. The street is my studio, that’s where I get ideas and then they take on a different life in the editing and sequencing process.

LR: What would you say your primary influences are? Walk us through them, and tell us why, in the larger scheme of things, we should care.

MHE: I’m interested in what happens when cultures come together; you can stop-motion view the way that culture’s change, rub-off on one another, assimilate — it can be as simple as the assemblage of images and objects on the dashboard of a car, or the combinations of sounds and languages on a street on any given evening. The hyphen or the hybrid state is essentially American — one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world – and yet still Americana is associated with an outdated aesthetic of suburban sameness. There was a point when I took pictures as a way of rebutting Stephen Shore’s entire catalog of images — his [version of] “pop culture” is not my pop culture which is fine but I wanted to see the things I saw as being tenants of American culture given the status of being iconic.

Urban public space can be a wonderland, it can be a war-zone; a space of invention and resilience urban neighborhoods are the physical junction of pragmatism and desire. When Cuban theorist Antonio Benitez-Rojo wrote in his book The Repeating Island “Processes, dynamics and rhythms show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous, or, if you like the unpredictable that coexists with us in our everyday world,” he was talking about Caribbean space, but also describing a way of conceiving public space.

The stack of crates behind the bodega may not seem noteworthy but is actually latent with untapped potential to become a dominoes table, an old mans chair, a roadside produce store. A multi-speaker sound system can stir more deep down feeling than witnessing a shiny new skyscraper. It’s my works mission to make you feel that kind of veneration for something you might have written off. Pepon Osorio does that with his installations. I think photographer Anthony Hernandez does that with his series Landscapes for the Homeless. Simone Leigh’s use of everyday objects in her sculptures convey that. Your public installation of small shrines in the East Village consider this as well. Charles Burnett’s films Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding casts a lover’s gaze on Watts in Los Angeles. My favorite kinds of art point to something overlooked and make you see the beauty and power that is in fact there.

LR: “Édouard Glissant”…does that name ring a bell? What role does his writing play in the work you choose to produce?

I was really honored to have the chance to co-curate an event in memoriam of the late writer and theorist Edouard Glissant, whom is a great inspiration to me, at the art space Recess Activities this summer. The event was an installment of Simone Leigh’s serial programming Be Black Baby. Artists such as Jayson Keeling and Devin KKenny presented works and scholars Kelly Josephs, Alessandra Benedicity and Kaiama L. Glover gave a fabulous tribute to Glissant’s text The Poetics of Relation.

It was instructive while putting together the event to try to take a step back and explain Creolization to an audience primarily composed of the larger arts community. The word “creole” is commonly used to describe “pidgin” languages such as Jamaican Patois or Haitian Kreyol. It’s also a word that’s historically been used to describe West Indian people of mixed race. The concept of “Creolization” emerged from the potential Caribbean writers and theorists had begun to unpack from the definition of Creole; by applying the word to culture rather than solely to language or identity Creolization can describe hybridity in all its forms, giving us new language for social structures and rhythms.

While Creolization is a concept of the Caribbean it can be used to describe larger social currents. Edouard Glissant’s writings on the topic are expansive and prolific. Glissant uses Creoliztion to critique “globalization” which infers a shrinking center, or a growing homogeneity due to convergences of cultures. Creolization as supposed to globalization preserves locality and thus is an important dialogue for cultural producers to actively engage with. Dr. Kaiama Glover drew these two circles at Be Black Baby that illustrates this perfectly:

LR: What music are you listening to these days?

MHE: Analyzing music is an important component of my practice. Urban neighborhoods are a living mixtape. Sit on a corner you will hear the songs that are important to people through windows and from passing cars overlapping like a real time remix. It is a widely held belief that hip-hop arose from the selector and soundsystem traditions of Dancehall, including the production model of songs starting with the base of a “riddim” or musical loop over which multiple artists and selectors/DJs add additional sounds, voices and lyrics. This act of layering seemingly disparate sounds could be viewed as a mimicking or mirroring of the sonic experience of one’s neighborhood.

The exchanges between and within hip-hop and dancehall are not talked about enough. Both are inflected with South Asian, South American, African, African American and Spanish and Afro-Caribbean cultural elements. Take for instance Dancehall star Mavado whose voice is styled after the Islamic call to prayer. The diversity in the sounds of the music reflects the cultural complexities of the identities of the neighborhoods the music comes from. Dancehall used to originate primarily in Jamaica but now artists like Ricky Blaze from Flatbush in Brooklyn produce hits for Dancehall stars in Kingston.

I think Dancehall specifically is a visual music; the culture of the Dance Hall is just as much a part of the music as the track or the riddim. If you watch footage of the late Bogle, whom is considered the founding father of contemporary dance styles in the Dance hall, one can see the synthesis of culture, capitalism and history in his impressive and visionary movements — simultaneously African, Caribbean and reminiscent of Michael Jackson all at once.

LR: What are you reading these days? Be honest.

MHE: Right now I’m working my way through Sonjah Stanley Niah’s fabulous dissertation on Dancehall in Jamaica From Slave Ship to Ghetto and also Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I read very slowly though — I carry a book around with me for months and read a bit at a time on the train. Staying in motion is a big part of my practice and livelihood being an artist; [this]…often requires working several jobs and putting in work on several creative projects at a time.

Legacy Russell is a writer, artist, and cultural producer. She is the Art Editor for BOMB magazine’s BOMBlog and the co-founder of CONTACTProject.net.