bomb / balm
Sade LaNay


July 20 – August 15, 2021
On view day and night at Bushel: Response Space

Saturday, August 7, 12pm-3pm:
Open house with a reading and artist’s talk

In Sade LaNay’s window installation, a soft sacred space remains blocked from viewers’ reach and sight by glass, glare, sheer paper, and psychic discord. The noise of global and arbitrary borders looms in the background. By making opaque and tangible the barriers of capitalism, society, and mental distress bomb/balm interrogates the accessibility of the road to recovery and manipulates the tenets of monumentality to frustrate the journey to transcendence. 

Sade LaNay is a poet and artist from Houston, TX. They are the author of I love you and I’m not dead (Argos Books), the 2021 winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Her poems are included in the Bettering American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry anthologies. Her work tests the limits of language and creativity as a balm for systemic violence and generational trauma, specifically as it pertains to lives and bodies of Black and queer people. Sade engages in printmaking, silk painting, and book arts with the goal of recognizing human connection in the midst of the ongoing struggle for liberation. They are forging an escape route out of this failing country, with an indefinite respite in the Catskills.

This installation includes two broadsides by LaNay, available in a limited edition from Bushel Editions.

This exhibition program is made possible with funds from the Delaware County Arts Grants, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered in Delaware County by the Roxbury Arts Group.