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He purposely fails at gender, race, and sex, appearing in agony and ecstasy.
Harriss art asks, When will it end?
More recently, hes taught and worked in Ghana, which has further influenced his work.
I am also fascinated by the apparatus of photography in its most violent sense.
This new series, Flash of the Spirit, is your first self-portrait series since 2002.
This [consideration] coincided with me receiving a promised gift from my uncle: a mask.
It is a golden Goli mask from the Baule people.
It was the Wednesday before he had thecoverof the New YorkTimesmagazine barefoot.
He brought about a hundred-dollar bottle Champagne and offered us some.
With the mask, all these memories came back.
Your history with the self-portrait is legendary.
AsEssex Hemphillsaid to me early on, its not self-portraiture for the sake of doing the portrait itself.
The [image] becomes a figure or entity through which I can deal with a series of experiments.
There is almost a rupture in notions of masculinity.
Constructs for me is really an implicit critique of Mapplethorpe.I would say theres definitely an engagement.
Its less a critique of him and more about the hegemonic way in which culture works.
In Flash of the Spirit, it feels like you are after transformation or transcendence.
Its about our trajectories.
Some of these images were shot inProvincetownand onFire Island, two traditionally white gay vacation spots.
What does it mean to somehow provoke the African diaspora in these spaces?
Im not saying [Africanism] is gay per se, but Im trying to make a link back.
Atavistic heteronormativity is mapped onto Afrofuturism in 2018.
It can be much more open and reflect the lives that we actually live.
So these new photographs are an intervention?Yeah, an engagement, a play, an intervention.
Where in these new works something else happened: The figure is transported outside into the landscape.
Thinking about black futurism, I am reminded of your Ektachrome Archive from the 1980s and early 90s.
The archive shows their work; their legacies have become our inheritance.
It was much more intuitive.
My grandfather was a race man; he was a disciple of W.E.B.
Dubois who grew up in Albany.
He documented his friends and family in over 10,000 Ektachrome slides.
It was an idyllic, Edenic situation where I could be who I was.
I could explore my sexuality at a young age there where it began to emerge.
Im thinking about our bodies and pleasure.
Im interested in trying to bring that energy forth.
I think art has the potential to do that.
