• Joe Leavenworth
  • Ayngel
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Joe Leavenworth
Ayngel
Native Son
Tulsa
Portraits
Books
Info
CV

coulditall
beginagain?

                                 




Years on 

I carry,

wherever I go,

Your echo

Traveling deeper into the night


I picture the Earth 

think i     n          g


turning over


being,

absence,

loss




I'd be disingenuous if I didn't acknowledge an old line:

I was you

Stay on your guard, Joe

 

Anyone who dismisses you

Dismiss them promptly, 

Permanently, and

Without recollection

 

Don’t compromise on what matters to you

Keep active

 

Do not cultivate the uninterested

Do not accommodate them

Keep away from them

Do not work for them

or, with them 

 

Don’t get lost


Ayngel emerged from a chance encounter at a gas-station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

This body of work investigates the emotional, material, and transformative evolutions of identity and the desire for and enduring effects of human connection. Through an elliptical sequence of portraits, still-lifes, appropriated images, and diaristic texts, the work intertwines fictions considering family, labor, mental-health, and memory. In the process, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble to highlight the inherently fictive and fragmentary nature of depiction. Ayngel is an act of love, focused on the value of familial and social bonds during our contemporary era of exceeding social and political instability across the United States.





coulditall
beginagain?

                                 




Years on 

I carry,

wherever I go,

Your echo

Traveling deeper into the night


I picture the Earth 

think i     n          g


turning over


being,

absence,

loss




I'd be disingenuous if I didn't acknowledge an old line:

I was you

Stay on your guard, Joe

 

Anyone who dismisses you

Dismiss them promptly, 

Permanently, and

Without recollection

 

Don’t compromise on what matters to you

Keep active

 

Do not cultivate the uninterested

Do not accommodate them

Keep away from them

Do not work for them

or, with them 

 

Don’t get lost


Ayngel emerged from a chance encounter at a gas-station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

This body of work investigates the emotional, material, and transformative evolutions of identity and the desire for and enduring effects of human connection. Through an elliptical sequence of portraits, still-lifes, appropriated images, and diaristic texts, the work intertwines fictions considering family, labor, mental-health, and memory. In the process, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble to highlight the inherently fictive and fragmentary nature of depiction. Ayngel is an act of love, focused on the value of familial and social bonds during our contemporary era of exceeding social and political instability across the United States.