By Melina Paris, Contributing Writer
Dominque Moody’s Nomad is both visual and performance art. It also happens to be artful living. The exhibit was Dominque Moody’s mobile living space that she built from found objects and salvaged materials, such as corrugated metal and reclaimed wood.
I visited Nomad this past December at the California African American Art Museum. The venue, and each venue in which she exhibits her work, makes arrangements so that she could continue living in her dwelling/masterpiece during the five-day exhibition.
“The living in it [aspect] is as equally important as a configuration of it as a work of art,” Moody said.
Moody’s, The Nomad, was a part of VisionLA ’15 Climate Action Arts Festival which was launched to coincide with the International ten day talks on climate change in Paris this past December. Moody’s work was concerned with what she calls economic and climate refugees. Moody’s work is particularly relevant considering that Angelenos have been debating about what to do with these refugees before El Niño hits the city.
Moody believes that allowing shelters, crafted by artists, for the homeless addresses a foremost social issue on housing.
“People are not quite sure how to address these issues,” Moody said. “But the more that the public has an opportunity to see them, I think it makes for a much more dynamic and powerful statement.”
The Nomad is a self-sufficient and self-contained mobile unit allowing Moody’s work to connect more intimately to the public. The experience is akin to walking a through a home on a home tour with residents available to answer questions.
The Nomad is outfitted with a grey water tank that recycles wastewater for reuse and a solar panel to provide heat and electricity.
It was more affordable to go portable,” Moody said.
The corrugated metal exterior of the The Nomad displays a beautiful, but unintentional landscape.
On one side of The Nomad’s exterior is what Moody calls “Daytime” where she painted a topography of green to brown which is so classically California. The other side, she calls, “Nighttime” which seems to depict the cosmos over a flowing river.
The landscape was the result of her treating the unsealed metal using water, salt and vinegar, which brought out a patina in the metal. Then on top of the patina is a metal stain.
“I had no idea I did a landscape because I was working with each panel on the ground and I never had an area where I could lay it all out,” Moody said.
“I only had the area of color that I was working on. But building this in Altadena, where you are ringed by mountains, you naturally (create) if you’re in tune with your surroundings; it just naturally happens.”
Moody believes in balancing the natural environment with the man-made environment and says that one is a reflection of the other.
“As an artist that’s what you want to capture but you’re not always doing it in a fully conscious way,” Moody said. “You’re feeling it as you go and it starts to manifest itself.”
Aside from having all the amenities for cooking, sleeping and washing, the inside of The Nomad is neat, compact and comfortable space that is both Spartan and Afro-centric, warm and rich, and full of life.
Through the building of The Nomad, Moody said she was able to reclaim the experience of her family’s and her own personal journey, which started in motor homes when she was a small child. Moody described it as a way for her family to circumnavigate the limits of the Jim Crow era.
In the 1950’s, Moody’s family traveled, living full time in a trailer. They were not allowed to stay in a hotel or go into a restaurant at that time, due to segregation. To be completely self-sufficient at that time was unheard of, even amongst people who could afford recreational trailers. It was completely unheard of for African Americans to do so.
Her father got a big commission to be a recruitment officer through the south in the 1950s, at the height of Jim Crow. He bought a 45-foot, silver and red, New Moon trailer by The Redman Co., still known as the largest travel trailer ever built. They traveled throughout the South. Moody notes that they were able to do that, though they had to encounter a lot of “stuff,” even with her father in full uniform.
As a child Moody was always fascinated by her life experience. Her family moved frequently, knew how to be mobile, and made that an acceptable norm. During the 60s, though her family did not have a lot of cultural background and understanding about the specifics, they felt that using the term “nomad” allowed them to frame what they were doing in a particular way.
“We used to call ourselves nomads, because we felt as kids that that was a positive thing,” Moody said. “That it was about being, a way of life, and that we knew there were nomadic people in Africa. Our mom would say to us when we moved, ‘Don’t think of the fact that we are leaving our home, home is carried within us.’ I think that was an important idea to understand and learn some wisdom. It was certainly in keeping with nomadic practices.”
A combination of things kept her family moving frequently. Through the process of making Nomad, Moody learned that it is much deeper than economics, issues of segregation or (being) an ex-military family with a pattern of moving. It’s all of the above, but still there is a much deeper story.
Recently, Moody’s family found that their matrilineal DNA traces them back to African ancestors who are both among the largest nomadic tribes, the Fulani and Hausa tribes.
“The tribes span a tremendous part of Africa from coast to coast, from northern to central Africa,” Moody said. “Nomadic peoples go beyond any colonized borders, and they are still trying to practice that way of life. But at one time, when we looked at just human evolution, just human practice of being, initially we were all nomadic. It was the first way of living on the planet and recognizing the planet as our collective home.”
As a young person she did not understand the depths of that but Moody felt the nomadic way helped make sense of moving about and how to claim a space as home.
“Most immigrants have some connection to a motherland, a home,” Moody said. “The African experience in the Americas was radically different. We were in displacement, in bondage and so we came to a place that was never desired and wanted to be considered as a destination for home, which is really critical.”
But she came to an epiphany.
“I realized what could that possibly do, if you are nomadic and then enslaved?” Moody wondered aloud. “Because you are the ultimate practice of freedom when you are nomadic. To then be enslaved and in bondage and to be not allowed to roam in your natural way, that has got to have an imprint on your whole being, and even your genetic imprint. I inherited that. I needed to manifest The Nomad regardless. It was in my DNA to do this.”
Details: http://dominiquemoody.com