Christie Neptune
Christie Neptune is an Afro-Caribbean American interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. She is reading for a DPhil in fine art practice at the Ruskin School of Art, generously supported by The Clarendon Fund in partnership with the Flora Welch Clarendon Scholarship at St Hugh's College.
Neptune’s practice examines the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive space. Through photography, moving image, sculpture, and performance, Neptune explores how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Her doctoral research, tentatively entitled "Towards an African Cosmology: A Marked Axiological Shift in Representational Practice", interrogates the tools of digital surveillance, including AI-powered biometric technology, closed-circuit television (CCTV), and the enduring strategies of algorithmic governance wielded by the state to regulate and control behavior. Can these devices, critical to frameworks of state dominance, be co-opted to postulate a new cultural politics of difference? Can they be divorced from power and absorbed into new frameworks of understanding that resist and nurture, and how might this intervention look in representational practice? Neptune’s research navigates the inherent paradox of this query to interrogate and re-imagine the violence of framing. Through interactive mediated performance (participatory public performance experienced through technology), she explores the possibilities and, conversely, the limitations of co-option, an algorithmic tactic of resistance within artistic interventions into digital surveillance. Co-option, in this context, draws focus to the centrality of the body within myth making practices, specifically the body’s role within the choreography of politics threaded between identity, movement, and access. As an artistic intervention, it retools the paradigms of visibility to spotlight deep-rooted prejudice at the core of digital surveillance.
Neptune received her M.S. from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Art, Culture, and Technology and her B.A. from Fordham University in Visual Arts. Neptune's work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art Medellín (MAMM), Gagosian, Martos Gallery, and the Queens Museum, amongst others. Her work is in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. In 2021, she was awarded the Prix Medeos for the presentation of her work at Art-O-Rama in Marseille, France. Her work has been widely discussed in publications such as 4 Columns, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Her numerous awards and residencies include the Pioneer Works visual arts residency, Light Work artist-in-residence, a NYFA fellowship in interdisciplinary arts, a Smack Mellon studio residency in partnership with the Van Lier fellowship, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts artist-in-marketplace (AIM) Fellowship, among others. Neptune has worked as a visiting lecturer in the MFA photography department at the Parsons School of Design and the Foundations department at Pratt Institute in New York City. She has been invited to speak as a visiting artist at Washington College, the University of Delaware, and Cornell Tech in the United States.
