True North, No Hanging, A Merry Kiss and Auset my Heart fill the walls with emotion and insight into how extended family, loss and resilience during formative years, can play a major role in who we become. 

The Root of Love experience is taking a walk through the ventricles of Blue Robin’s heart. You think maybe you’re getting to know him, when in fact, you are getting to know yourself. When you read the explanation of each piece, you realize these are feelings you are familiar with and hopefully, they are feelings you’ve healed from and now you’re standing here looking at art that makes you realize that you have, in fact, healed and grown and evolved into who you currently are. 

Choosing to come up against this exhibit has brought to mind a word I once learned during a time of transformation, enoument, which means the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

The end of 2020 is quickly approaching and when I think back on this past year at all the things I’ve lost, all the things I’ve experienced and the things that brought me to this point and taught me how to persevere...I am reminded that life ebbs and flows. There is joy and there is pain and without one, you cannot know the other. I entered this exhibit thinking I was entering the artist’s heart, and that the centerpiece of True North could be symbolic of me standing there, in his heart. I left feeling cleansed and renewed, back onto the streets of Philly to continue being the jawn I was born to be. Ever evolving.