Sam Vernon is an installation artist who pieces together her unsettling xeroxed drawings in a blended horror/Afrofuturist (a genre that meshes African history with mysticism, fantasy, and science fiction) aesthetic. Her work is attractively disturbing, with distorted human figures that combine the familiar with the alien. Vernon explores modern dilemmas that face African Americans such as sexism, racism, and post-colonialism, and I'm tempted to compare her downtrodden shadow-people to Kara Walker's silhouettes, yet the racial undertones of Vernon's work are much less obvious. I'd say that the visual impact of Vernon's installations precedes their ideas, but this does not make the art any less appealing. 

How Ghosts Sleep (Haunted House IV), 2009

I'm very drawn to what I call the indie-horror aesthetic, the kind that embraces crude and primitive symbols that are easily interpreted but somehow "wrong" in their delivery ("Legs" is a good example of this scary minimalist vocabulary). Vernon uses this to great effect, at once making the turmoil of her characters feel universal while also embracing symbology as a reference to dehumanization, as Africans were dehumanized throughout history.

Legs, 2009

Vernon's abstractions also create a space that focuses purely on human psychology and emotion. She writes "...My mark-making, patterns and aesthetic is in many ways otherworldly, an alternative universe. I write in my artist statement that the installations are 'fear, anxiety and memory translated on flapping sheets. Ghosts congeal and bodies form in dark corners and hang about whispering until the inflection of their voices can be heard among the living.'"

The drawings remind us of vindictive ghosts that look back at us viewers, reprimanding, resenting, mourning, and waiting to be acknowledged.

Don't Worry What Happens Happens Mostly Without You, 2012

Vernon regards her work as an artistic experiment mostly independent of financial concern, as she does not profit much from her installations. I find the lack of compensation disappointing since her work does convey a truly fascinating and mysterious world, part history and part fantasy, on the brink of our own. 

Grass, 2011