On Sasha Phyars-Burgess and the Work of Abstraction

Newcity - September 2020

Locate 41.8949° N, 87.7654° W and you are positioned on the Far West Side of Chicago in the neighborhood of South Austin. You are on the corner of Chicago and Central Avenues, to be precise. I know of those coordinates and of that place because of Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ project: UNTITLED AND YET TO BE DETERMINED, 41.8949° N, 87.7654° W (AUSTIN). Austin, the site of her photographic study, is a community area that has historically been disregarded by the City of Chicago within their strategic plans for investment and social services. Within her project, one can see a duality of photography's work. In a space between art and documentary, interderminancy and precision, Phyars-Burgess undertakes figuring the community of Austin and the people who live there.

As a beneficiary of Heartland Alliance's support and working alongside their other programs, Phyars-Burgess has questioned her position and complicity within the overarching structure. A longstanding question for photographers; the answer is still unclear. But the question lives alongside Phyars-Burgess’ work which focuses on those living in spite of an ongoing slow crisis (which also has escalated in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic). Her image-making is a study of living in abstracted space:

I'm fractured, there's a fracture in the thing that we do, being in these bodies. My skin has made me blank, but my skin has also made me visible. I feel like that sounds like madness, but I've been trying to understand this thing. What's it like to be an abstraction, to be fractured constantly to be in six different places at once to be virtual and in reality and behind, and perhaps that is the experience of being a human being. But I think that there is something particular about being Black, that asks of you to be in multiple places at once.

The question for study here is not quite how do we create a more equitable system that ensures the safety and well-being for all; the answer is not as concrete as defunding police and contributing more capital into Austin (although, yes and yes). The question is how do you live in a Black body? After the Black body has reached such a point of abstraction, you could lose your body just by being you, by living. And as much as one might interrogate and challenge the iterative violence on Black bodies and their communities, that question is unanswerable. 

How does one apply the tools and practice of art to the study of an unanswerable question? Photography has an empirical value to capture a scene, hold it so that one might look at a fleeting moment, again and again, to find something unseen and offer a conclusive end. But for Phyars-Burgess photography does not hold historical truths and the work, through all of her study of people living in Austin, does not add black-and-white clarity or defined contours and edges, “I feel like I'm trying to explain something that is unexplainable,” Phyars-Burgess shares, “Which is like what it is to be Black and alive. And I am aware that even in my desire to explain, I'm failing all the time because it's unexplainable. To be a double negative, a double negative all the time–Black and alive–to be in constant abstraction is to be unexplainable, is to be unreadable. It is to be unintelligible.”

Read the full article in Newcity’s September 2020 issue