Shani Strand

Deli Gallery presents the exhibition Walk Good, Act Bad by Shani Strand.

The duppy, the badman, and the fallen angel portrayed in Shani Strand’s ceramic vessels are representative of a haunting of the Western man’s world-system of knowledge. Here, beyond this world of “reason” and beyond the institutionalized norm of man, duppies become portraits of ungovernable beings existing beyond the gravitational pull of the institutionalized “center” of the world. The duppy, the badman, and the fallen angel, embrace their mandated/inscribed origin story of eternal damnation knowing well that ascending to heaven is an impossibility, and they then represent a massive graveyard from which life must be reproduced.

Walk Good, Act Bad expresses a “radical interdependence of all phenomena” where a “line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.” This is articulated in terms of the Chain of Being, the hierarchical divisions between God, Angels, Man, Animals and Matter that makes up the earth, and in which humans are unique in their sharing of spiritual and physical attributes with all the aforementioned things. If so, then good could possibly embrace “badmanism” as a strategy against the institutionalized hegemonic normativity of humanity. 

In Humanism, God was supplanted by Western Man during the age of Enlightenment, and thus the refusal of “reason” can be linked to the duppy, the badman, and the fallen angel as they are all also spiritual, earthly and damned to earth, if not to hell, eternally. When Copernicus made the earth move and created a heresayer out of Galileo, the norm of man also experienced a rupture: the instantiation of the Other, the not quite, the non-men, and the non-being, often referred to as the “primitive”, the “savage” and the “despised heathen”, synonyms for a nuanced outlawry of “badmanism.”

In our western episteme, inseparable from this Other, the house is haunted and everyone is paranoid. This exhibition, in which our sense of being within a counter-cosmogony where the demeaned are empowered and where discursive truths exist to form a new politics of being, creates the space for the duppy, the badman, and the fallen angel to manifest new forms of articulating our sociality, our being — to show how love, much like God intended it, makes it ultimately preferable “to bring good out of evil than not to allow evil at all.” 

Shani Strand is a Los Angeles-based, multidisciplinary artist exploring themes such as colonialism, violence, and theology through dynamic installation projects. Strand has recently exhibited in daydreaming pressed against a fence (Harkawik, Los Angeles), Extra Terrestrial (Rachel Uffner, New York); A Gathering(HOUSING, New York); and 100% Salt (HOUSING, New York). She has performed with Miho Hatori at The Broad (Los Angeles, 2022), and held residencies at Automata (Los Angeles) and Interstate Projects (Brooklyn). She has been published by The Avery Review (2023) and Pin-Up Magazine (2021) and lectured at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022). Strand was the graduate student speaker at her commencement from UCLA MFA in 2023.

— Deli Gallery