Sydney Cain’s Spiritual Refusals amidst the Afterlives of Slavery

Sydney Cain (she/them) is a young, Bay-area based artist whose multimedia works on paper explore Black ancestral memory, transformation, and spirituality. Using a process of reduction, Cain moves small particles of elements such as chalk and graphite in a circular motion to surface shapes and figures. These figures are often faceless and incomplete; their blurred silhouettes evoking traces, incomplete memories, and ghostly presences. Cain refers to these figures as ancestral spirits, and their graphite and chalk as ciphers that assist in decoding “unseen realities.” The artist's discussion of these zones of liminality, and their commitment to rendering these ephemeral, ancestral forms provoke the questions: what does it mean to make legible something which we feel is always there? What does it mean to make your ancestors visible, to conjure them within an aesthetic realm? This paper will explore Cain’s interest in spirituality and ancestral memory through Refutations (2018- ), an ongoing body of work that centers narratives of Black resistance across time. Using Christina Sharpe’s theories on the afterlives of slavery, Saidiya Hartman’s practice of reading with and against archives, and M. Jacqui Alexander’s scholarship on practitioners of African-descendent religions, I argue that Cain’s practice is a form of embodied spiritual labor that ruptures the linearity of anti-Black conditions structuring the past and present