“MOTISA”: This work by Atisha Fordyce is featured in “Split Ends,” running through May 25 at BSB Gallery in Trenton. In the exhibit, artists Fordyce and Quinci Baker illustrate the settling of roots and creation of home in lands unknown in a collaboration of multimedia works and installation.

“Split Ends,” a collaboration between artists Atisha Fordyce and Quinci Baker is featured at BSB Gallery through May 25.

The exhibit is a collaboration of multimedia and installation. In an exploration of collective identity, artists Fordyce and Baker illustrate the settling of roots and creation of home in lands unknown.

Inspired by maroon cultures in the Americas, Fordyce and Baker’s use of landscape and the interior merge in an investigation of safe spaces as well as the overlap of displacement and resistance historically.

Fordyce’s drawings on surfaces reference the body through figurative depictions, while Baker’s drawings in space use repetitive forms in assemblages that encourage the viewer to activate the pieces. Their works divulge secret languages that develop through the collective experiences of marginalized people.

While referencing family traditions often under-recognized and overlooked in the art world, they revere them as forms of resistance and activism. Fordyce’s investment with the notions of home and family as subjects create ways to access memories, which morph each time they are accessed. She simply catches them in their midst. Baker arranges cultural imagery in the form of visual apothegms. She declares the human body as a force of nature and uses politics and history to corroborate that narrative. Baker and Fordyce both received their BFAs from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2016.

BSB Gallery is a nonprofit contemporary art space located at 143 East State Street in downtown Trenton. For more information, visit www.bsbgallery.com.