André Daughtry: SKETCHES for WILDERNESS

Sketches for WILDERNESS serves as a visual travelogue or journal in which Daughtry pulls together and explores elements for a larger project titled WILDERNESS, a speculative documentary photography, film and performance project that engages an “integral ecological” approach to sustainability and spirituality. The project is an investigation into how western societies’ ecological awareness could possibly be expanded through contact with Indigenous populations and their respective cosmologies and traditions. Captured in the Cauca region of southern Colombia, WILDERNESS engages with environmental hermeneutics (an ecological investigation of the theory and methodology of interpretation) in order to look into rediscovering “place.” By exploring the fields of cartography and lens-based media art, the project attempts to share experiences that can bring us out of scientistic notions of space and back to place. This project is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. André Daughtry is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary photography and media artist, writer, and performer born in Queens, NY. André’s work as a “speculative social documentarian” explores contemporary expressions/experiences of the spiritual, mystical, and theological in the contexts of pluralistic democracies. He received his MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MA in Theology and the Arts from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Daughtry’s accolades include being the inaugural recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award from California Institute of the Arts and receiving the Robert E. Seaver Award in Worship and the Arts from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He has been an artist in residence at Redline Gallery in Denver, as well as the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program.