Christie Neptune
Christie Neptune (b. 1986) is a first-generation West Indian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar. She is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and St. Hugh’s College.
Neptune’s work interrogates the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space. Through the formal praxes of portraiture, moving image, sculpture, and performance, Neptune examines how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Critically aware of self, she employs varying degrees of subjectivity to shift axes of language and power within representational practice. Utilizing the values and semiotics of black culture, industrial and domestic objects, and the material properties of film, Neptune foregrounds phenomenological blackness, the intricate and wide-ranging dimensions of black inner life.
Neptune draws from her lived experience within the American urban, mid-20th-century minimalist aesthetics in art and architecture, black-feminist geographies, and processes of conceptualism. Through screen practice, assemblage, relational aesthetics, and the marked conventions of visual culture, she explores the disintegration of time and memory. In her work, (re)animated objects and lens-based media meander a thin line between real and imagined space to foster new sensibilities of seeing and knowing. This intervention moves the camera's gaze beyond temporal boundaries and spatial dimensions to enable the persistence of new knowledge formations across both dominant and marginal spatialities. As a material conduit within this schema, the body and framed objects channel the history(s) of yore, colliding the past and present to reimagine the fullness of time.
Christie Neptune has a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, and a Bachelor of Arts from Fordham University. Neptune's work has been exhibited at venues including: Gagosian, New York; We Buy Gold, New York; Martos Gallery, New York; Tilton Gallery, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; 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, Marseille. 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 Backslash Fund at Cornell Tech, Light Work Artist-in-Residence, NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, Smack Mellon Studio Residency, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Fellowship, among others. During the 2023/2024 school year, Neptune was a visiting lecturer at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, The New School. In the Fall of 2024, Neptune began her doctoral research in fine art under the supervision of Oreet Ashery and Dr. Onyeka Igwe. The working title of Neptune’s DPhil is Towards an African Cosmology: Marked (Black) Axiological Shifts within Representational Practice, generously supported by The Clarendon Fund in partnership with the Flora Welch Clarendon Scholarship at St Hugh's College.
