Bio
J. Johari Palacio is a Houston-based painter and selector. He holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Art from Columbia College Chicago. His solo exhibitions include Unlocking Frequency at Studio Eight08, Houston, presented by Janice Bond / ART IS BOND with Studio Eight08 and Emergent & Co., and Gravitas at Slant Space Gallery, Austin. His work has been covered by Glasstire and published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
Statement
I started tagging in South Central Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Meanstreak, the tool I tagged with, is still in most of my paintings.
I paint in acrylic, meanstreak and collage on canvas, and I work as a selector.
The paintings build a counter-mythology from Garifuna history. It begins on Yurumein, where Africans and Indigenous islanders became the Garínagu, and it runs through Satuye's resistance. I'm a descendant of that lineage.
I think of each canvas as carrying instructions for people who may come later: maps and circuitry, technologies that don't exist yet. Abstraction keeps those instructions open, because I don't get to decide what they'll mean to whoever finds them. Frequency keeps the work moving. It comes from the dügü drums and from years of selecting records, and I build a surface the way sound travels, in layers that return and cut.
Sun Ra and John Akomfrah aren't references; they're how I work.