Honoring Black Artists - Jacarrea Garraway

The Self Publication - Juneteenth Showcase

In honor of Juneteenth this year, The Self Publication is featuring Black creatives in a week-long showcase to highlight our creativity, resilience, and multifaceted methods of beautifully expressing our emotions and mindsets while navigating systemic antiBlackness in our society.

Today we would like to present: Jacarrea Garraway

About the artist:

Jacarrea Garraway is a director from Boston, Massachusetts. Known for her afro surrealist aesthetic and attraction to cultural references, she creates visual moments that capture poetry in motion with an intimate and authentic understanding of externalizing our interior worlds.

She is skilled at capturing natural performances that reveal more insight into the Black imagination. Jacarrea’s most recent work considers the ways in which films can depict sequences of Black beauty, movement, and music in order to capture a sense of double consciousness.

photo courtesy of Jonathan George

Through juxtaposing and staging subjects in particular settings and scenarios, she examines the way Black bodies present in the media walk a thin line between authenticity and objectification. She received a BFA from New York University in 2020 and was a recipient of the Clive Davis Excellence in Music in Film award, the Tony Hawkins Award for Best Adapted Audio Drama and Best Youth Documentary at the Newark International Film Festival. Jacarrea is based in NYC.

Artist Creative Statement: Release is a film that invites us into the mind of Isaiah, an incarcerated man who attempts to liberate himself through his imagination. The challenge that I wanted to really impose on myself with this project was creating a piece that didn’t rely heavily on dialogue. There was so much I wanted to say, but more that I wanted to show. I do not have the experience of being a man who was incarcerated, but I am very close to someone who was and that relationship caused me to wonder what was happening to them mentally while they were in that environment.

I thought about how to make a story as authentically as I could and came to the conclusion that I would have to come at it from a more figurative angle. The film centers around one particular moment where Isaiah is caught in between these two worlds. I appreciate how I layered so much material here through combining the mediums of filmmaking and dance."

Check out more work from the artist by clicking here.