I’m an Atlanta native and multidisciplinary artist in the Print Media Department, whose practice investigates racism and culture through comic culture and activism in a nonlinear approach with the tools of art, technology, distribution, interaction, social media, and comics. The work requires observation and hopefully results self-reflection from the viewers, partly by examining their role as cogs of “the system” or adapters of a layered reality of systemic racism and anti-blackness. The purpose of his work is to be a reaction to the failure of recognition by creating representations of Blackness and its vulnerability and power through my narrative “Sandra Blands With Capes Protecting The Black Youth From The Police.” The work’s intention is to have the Black community see themselves within the work and realize even with white oppression, the Black community does not have to succumb to it. I recreate a world that parallels our current with black experiences when fantasy intersects. Using counter storytelling, I am redistributing power. Power into me. Power in our truth. Power in community. Decentering pain with Black women dismantling systemic racism, the true superheroes in my life.
Creating Immersive experiences using 2D imagery on canvas to flags, auditory meditations to video sequences. The glitches, errors, and misregistations as it relates to the fluidity of Blackness and how diasporic it can be and actually have no limits promotes multi-dimensionality of Black individuality with the dialects of Black southern queer vernacular expression. A world that decolonizes Blackness and uplifts the power that was always there.
Demario Dotson is a recipient of the Robert C. Larson Award (2020). He is also the recipient of Queer Archive Work Residency in Providence, Rhode Island(2021). And was commissioned to be a part of the Ann Arbor Public Library District’s Black Lives Matter Mural Project(2021). Demario’s work has also been highlighted by Bemis Center as one of their Emerging Black Artists to watch.
