Directions Gallery Presents —
Justin A. Carney: Full of Dreams
September 2-October 17, 2025
Artist Talk: September 5, 4:30-5:30pm, Room F101
Opening Reception: September 5, 5:30-7:00pm
Full of Dreams questions how my identity is intertwined with the American landscape by looking to my family history. I question what traumas, griefs, pains, and joys get passed down through generations and how this lineage has shaped me. I travel to places where my family has lived and create photos of neighborhoods and homes, or of where homes and neighborhoods would have stood.
The work is inspired by my late grandmother’s lung cancer chest X-ray. An X-ray is a tool to see beneath the surface and reveal what ails the body, and the artwork, resembling an X-ray, asks what happened here—what cannot be seen? What cannot be researched?
In asking about my grandmother’s life, I learned that my family is related to one of the oldest documented African American families, the Quanders. Although that family has extensive documentation that can be found and researched, it has proved difficult to find documentation and stories about the Carney family. Most people who would have been able to tell me stories passed away when I was a baby. How has my family come to be cast off from the main family? Where were ties broken? How did the Carney family come to reside in Baltimore, Maryland? What roads did we travel? Who has been lost and forgotten? What joys and sorrows were had?
I am left with my imagination to fill in forgotten histories and bonds with loose threads, fears, and dreams. How do we re-member lost history, to put it back together? In a Black landscape—one that is hard to traverse and unreliable—how does one create and uncreate themselves? What will become of me if I am left to imagine, rather than to know, my history?
—Justin A. Carney
Date/Time
Date(s) - September 2, 2025 - October 7, 2025
All Day
Location
Directions Gallery, Visual Arts Building
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