NADA Curated by Daonne Huff

Hasani Sahlehe is originally from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

In his new series, Sahlehe is making work that is “so different from everything I had made for the past three years”, states the artist. After painting a little pink pyramid and learning that Stanley Whitney got the idea to “stack colors” after visiting the Egyptian pyramids, Sahlehe continued to make work that brought him back to the wobbly King Tut drawing he made in his 5th-grade composition book. “It returned my willingness to embrace the lore of curses, telekinetic civic planning, and perhaps discovering some royal blood.”

Prior, Sahlehe had been abstracting waterways, suns, and rainbows with the intention to make work that healed the mind, heart, and spirit. Much of the work had been made in and with grief, as the artist processed a friend’s 2019 suicide. To Sahlehe, it made sense to reflect on nature when contemplating mortality, and to pretend a little, to build structures that could never stand, and be okay with it.