My recent works foreground atmospheric affect, aquatic life, and queer Caribbean performance within oceanic imaginaries. They summon the Black Atlantic.

  In my imaginings, deities embody sound as well as silence, the visible as well as the unknown.  Barefoot crusaders dance on shifting sands by day and cruise verdant undercommons by night. Nude figures bathe in crepuscular light and specular blues while others wade in phosphorescent waters. Nightingales sing and patoos flare between crashing waves under howling moons. 

  Oil paint–through the gestures of dripping, smearing, bleeding, brushing, scraping, sanding, and layering–becomes a haptic language for conjuring the elusive, nuanced, unresolved, cacophonous and often unnamed feelings shared across collective experience. Its fluidity mirrors the blurry, slippery, and embodied undercurrents of desire, memory, fugitivity and becoming that animate my work.

Vernando Reuben is a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based artist, who works span across video, print, collage, and painting. His current work explores oceanic imaginaries within the Black Atlantic. He is a Morehouse College graduate, a Skowhegan alum, a Robert Blackburn Mason Kahn SIP fellow, and a recent graduate of the Yale School of Art with an MFA in Painting & Printmaking. His work has been featured at Tribeca's Bienvenu, Steinberg & C gallery, James Fuentes Gallery, NADA New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Carr Center in Detroit.