Hammonds House Museum is thrilled to launch the museum's 35th anniversary season with the beautiful and deeply reflective work of Tokie Rome-Taylor. Insight: Body as Artifact, Archive and Memory, examines memory as a combination of history and imagination. In this body of work, Rome-Taylor explores the visual reminders of memory, weaving the threads of history both real and reimagined. Insight of memory plays upon the notion of gaining sight visibility by looking at familial histories that are contained within memory and family, cultural and spiritual artifacts. 

Rome-Taylor views an artifact in the sense of what remains or what is left over– what echoes and what is determined not to be erased— as an artifact of memory. This artifact is contained in both the body of the mind and the body represented by material culture. These are things that we hold on to that represent our specific culture which is represented within family, housed in community, and a joining of others in shared memory. These works explore two worlds; the actual and the possible. 

About the Artist
Tokie Rome-Taylor explores themes of time, spirituality, visibility and identity through the medium of photography. Portraiture, set design, and objects all are a part of Tokie’s photographic practice. Digital photography, her foundational medium, explores the layered, complex relationship African Americans in the diaspora have with the western world.