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All water has a perfect memory, 2026
From colonization to the present, the history of African Americans and water has unfairly privileged visual narratives of the middle passage. The installation, All water has a perfect memory, challenges this assertion by engaging water as a culturally symbolic representation beyond trauma and empowering the viewer to situate themselves in the narrative where water liberates, nourishes, and sanctifies.
All water has a perfect memory incorporates spiritual, agricultural, and recreational imagery, key to the black aquatic experience. A clip of children dancing from Zora Neal Hurston’s 1928 film Fieldworks reveals some of the folkloric customs of African American communities along the River Road – waterways central to the cultural and economic development of communities in the American South. Overlayed with water imagery, the installation presents water as a landscape, resource, spiritual entity, and luminal space.
Chris Christion received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and his BFA from the University of Oklahoma. Additionally, he’s been awarded a Certificate of Leadership from the Academic Museums and Gallery Leadership Seminar at Northwestern University. Christion has a research-driven art practice that offers inclusiveness, cultural humility, and advocacy as necessary tools for reconsidering how one defines their lived identity. He has exhibited multimedia video works and installations in solo and group exhibitions, as well as at film festivals, including Eastside International (ESXLA), Los Angeles, and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, Riverside Museum of Art, Riverside, CA. Steppling Art Gallery, San Diego, CA, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, and Every Day Epic, a Juneteenth Film Program with Queer Film Continuum, Plaza District, & Nappy Roots in Tulsa, OK. In 2023, his work was included in the Research Guides published by the MexiCali Biennial team at the Library of Congress, which address key issues in border studies. Additionally, his work is part of the first- ever collection of digital public art commissioned for the California Natural Resources Agency Headquarters in Sacramento, California.
As part of a curatorial team with artist/curator Jessica Wimbley, Chris has developed the Biomythography curatorial project series, with exhibitions at academic and non-profit art spaces in Southern California, including Cerritos College, California Lutheran University, Eastside International (Los Angeles), University of La Verne, and Claremont Graduate University. Christion currently lives and works in Sacramento, CA, and has been a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department since 2019.
@christopherachristion | chrischristion.com