“If Today Never Gives Up In Me”

Abstract

Featuring a conversation with the artist, this essay offers a reading of Amina Ross's aesthetic practice across a selection of their work. Alongside Fred Moten's own critique of the overrepresentation of blackness as death-driven, it highlights their ongoing contributions to what they refer to as “black work,” or aesthetic experimentations in making multiple forms of blackness appear and emerge in the present moment. For Ross, the present is not merely a death-driven end but, at once, a rigid structure and a “space of unlimited potential” wherein blackness and black life may be experienced in their multiplicity. Placing objects in unexpected positions and built structures, Ross seeks to widen spectators' sense of their own present and immediate environment. As such, the present is, for them, a space to be, not escaped from, but worked on and reenvisioned in an effort to make a black present possible, livable, and replenishable.