The Spirit That Resides is the inaugural exhibition of the Carr Center Independent Scholars Fellowship (ISF) with resident artist Carrie Mae Weems, produced in collaboration with the Havana Biennial. Leaning on their collective experiences in Detroit, Michigan in November 2018 and February 2019, which included presentations, city tours, and group discussions; as well as off-site and in-studio work and research,  the ISF Scholars have created an interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional project that includes performance, visual documentation, object making, dance and movement, installation, photography, creative writing, and theoretical writing. The home/gallery site is more than just a site for presentation but also a site of production—it is an incubator for discovery, exchange, memory, and retention. Rooted in preserving and enacting sacred space, the multimedia works in this exhibition explore an ontological vastness within the self that exceeds immediate environment, emphasizing interiority as a means to anchor identity.

Interior Views interrogates the spaces between lost spaces in the architecture of home and the location of the spirit between science and memory. In utilizing reclaimed windows from homes in Oakland, California, Andrew Wilson is hoping to recontextualize the familiar architecture of his home, which is being stripped away as the city becomes increasingly gentrified. With more developments that can be quantified, the influx of new faces has steadily displaced folks from that place. Wilson is interested in locating the architecture of home and the interior of the body, creating a dialogue between these concepts by trying to find where spirit lies – the spirit that is being gutted from his home and the spirit of his grandmother. Wilson reproduces his grandmother’s MRI scans just before she passed away in 2013. While these scans are of his grandmother’s brain, they do not encapsulate her as a human. Similarly, as windows are permeable spaces connecting interior and exterior spaces, the MRI connects the medical world with the interior of the body.