Help us paint Oracle in shades of blue and a touch of yellow. The artist will provide a “map” to indicate what shades go where! Essentially, a GIANT paint-by-numbers! Bring your lunch and enjoy a sunny day in the courtyard.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I grew up searching for myself. My father took us to the Archives regularly and we were able to trace most of his family to 1860, where slavery robbed identities. But we were never able to find my great grandfather’s mother, Minnie Wells, further than the 1870 census. In 2011 I took a road trip that led me from my home in Brooklyn to the very small Maney’s Neck, North Carolina, following my father’s family line, that geographically splintered after slavery and before my greats moved north. After listening to mixtapes and podcasts, far out of range of my GPS, I found a local library in the nearest town. There I found a microfiche for an 1877 marriage license of my great grandfather’s father. It was a marriage between Winnie Wells and Julius Hart. But I knew her name was Minnie. With a one-letter error in transcription, Minnie had disappeared for over a century.

Our “factual” records are full of errors like these: a census taker’s handwriting or the subject’s accent changes a name or a race or a date. And that changes our history (our truth?). Even more often folks are left out of the records altogether. Yet our hegemony tells us these records are the facts, thus relegating oral histories and indigenous records to fictions.

I’m captivated by this slippage, this liminal space between truth and fiction, oral histories and written histories. Through my interdisciplinary practice I fuse fabricated and historical belief systems; legends that have been bequeathed through generations mixed with invention and intuition. I create new rituals to empower the individual. I make oracles.

The oracle for Chattanooga will have the appearance of an independent rooftop, removed from its house, and dropped from the sky onto the Stove Works grounds.  It could also suggest a house that has been buried or sunken into the earth, leaving an island of house to climb on. As with all legends of oracles, the methods of building my rooftops are passed from person to person. Carpentry was taught to me by my father. As a child, the hot asphalt shingles of our roof, which I had helped lay, was an oasis where I could bake in the sun and listen to music while reading. My Roof offers a space for visitors to climb atop and claim for their own for a bit, literally changing their perspective on their world as a metaphor for a potential ideological examination.  While the attic inside my Roof is more private and contemplative by nature and it asks the visitor to crouch beneath to access its private space, as attics do, finding it full of history, secrets and fantasies.

For this oracle, I have been thinking about visibility and audibility of intersecting communities that make up Chattanooga and the Stove Works neighborhood.  I was looking for manifestations of the intersection of this desire for communication/connection, with my fascination with threshold spaces and with the site itself. The threshold between what I say and what you hear. And I was ultimately inspired by the idea of change, of growth and of community stakeholders. I want to continue to mine my experiences in Chattanooga, and use, as a connective tissue, voice.

I want to reflect on the idea that this rooftop space may be “claimed” by anyone, that their frames of reference and activation of the piece is critical to complete it. For the site-specific heart of the oracle, I want to house a microphone. It will be a place for visitors to speak their minds or play music through a connection to a caged speaker inside the chimney. The oracle amplifies voices. To further hone-in on the concept of the liminal space, I want to plan a series of public programs to stretch the identity of the rooftop oracle through the activation and interpretation of each event.

I am interested in this kind of enigmatic nature of a space. It exists simultaneously inside and outside, the underground and the visible, private and public, minimal and handmade, the spiritual and the natural. The content of a form may further transform depending on who experiences it and their perception, which is what happens to legends that are handed down in their oral tradition: transformation. A rooftop can refer to home, stability, shelter, but in this context, it is also an action of claiming power- of influence, direction, and earth. This roof is a site of cosmic afro-futurism and ancient native legends.

-        Heather Hart

The Oracle of Connection could not have been made possible without the support and funding of Lyndhurst Foundation, Public Art Chattanooga, SETD, Arts Build, and a pretty remarkable private donor.