Working between sculpture, video, assemblage, and installation, Bronx-based artist and 2024-25 Princeton Hodder Fellow Abigail DeVille’s practice is one of site-specificity. The site itself can take many forms, from which the artist re-situates forgotten or erased narratives within broader historical timescales.
the heart knows its own bitterness consists of four anatomical heart-shaped sculptures. The work takes as its point of departure a series of shipping manifests filed in New Orleans from 1807 through 1860. These documents track the arrival of approximately 135,000 people sold into slavery in the largest slave market in the Deep South. The manifests are recorded on thirty rolls of microfilm and accessible through the U.S. Customs Service. They list the names, ages, and physical traits of the people forced aboard the ships, which are read aloud in the sound pieces that accompany each sculpture. The sounds piece combine singing, instruments, and environmental and bodily noises. DeVille collaborated with artist Justin Hicks for this element of the exhibition, who vocally explored the sounds of a healthy heart based on consultation with a heart specialist. In probing this open archive, DeVille unveils the violence of such indexical representation and the collapsed complexity of its subjects but also troubles the misapprehension that the lives of enslaved people are lost to history. Rather, their stories are simply hidden in plain sight, though often relegated to a space of subliminal darkness.
Black holes, voids, and porous boundaries often figure into DeVille’s work. They embody the continuous processes of making and unmaking from which all things form, and from which history is written. “America has numerous black holes in which it tries unsuccessfully to bury the bodies of its many democratic operatives,” the artist has reflected. “I use black holes as a loose metaphor for historical erasure. Black holes eviscerate matter, but the gravity of the matter remains to be discovered, interrogated, and recognized.” (from Jane Ursula Harris’ article “Fault Lines: Abigail DeVille Interviewed,” BOMB Magazine, June 14, 2021). In its metaphysical dimensions, the black hole marks an absence of light, but even here, in this liminal space, time continues to unfold. For DeVille, a black hole—an abstraction of an opening, an aperture, or an ellipse—represents a space of persistent misrecognition from which a veiled subject might emerge.
DeVille’s materials often speak to the intangibility of historical narratives. For the heart knows, the artist was particularly drawn to coal, which primarily consists of carbon, one of the most ubiquitous elements on the planet, from which all matter emanates and returns. Each coal-coated sculpture varies in dimension, approximately corresponding to that of a human body at different life stages. The structures house glass bottles stuffed with manifests, slightly visible only through the porous exterior. In drawing on the material ecology of carbon—a time-keeper, a relic, a capsule that transcends temporality—the heart knows memorializes erased histories of Black subjects, poetically operating at a similar threshold of liminal visibility.
DeVille’s work suggests that if the written record doesn’t capture our histories, then a new visual language must be written. Symbols of nationhood and identity can similarly be rewritten, or bear alternating meanings across time and space. The felt experience of diaspora may conceal certain narratives from official histories, but, as DeVille unveils, these narratives can be uncovered, if one only knows where to look.
— Text by Re’al Christian
Admission & Details
The exhibition is free and open to the public; no tickets required.
Gallery Hours
The Hurley Gallery is open to the public during venue hours: weekdays 7 AM-8:30 PM and weekends 9 AM-8:30 PM (entry building through Forum doors, the lower-level glass doors located across from WaWa).
University netID holders can access the exhibition 24/7.
Please note the following holiday hours:
- Closed November 27-28
- Gallery open Nov. 29-30 from 9 AM-8:30 PM (enter building through Forum doors, the lower-level glass doors located across from WaWa)
- Closed December 20-January 4
- Gallery open January 5-9 from 8 AM-5 PM
Directions
Get directions to the Hurley Gallery, located on the mezzanine level of the Lewis Arts complex.
Accessibility
The Hurley Gallery is an accessible venue. The best accessible entrance to the Hurley Gallery is via the Plaza level entrance using the Arts Tower elevator (down to level M). Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.
