Raven Moffett

Tucson-based photographic artist and storyteller Raven Moffett is currently pursuing a Studio Art MFA with a focus in photography at the University of Arizona. She received her BA in Art and Visual Culture with a studio emphasis and an Anthropology minor from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Her work has been exhibited in several shows in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Her poetry and art has been published in local publications in Boone and Atlanta along with national and international collections. Raven is interested in the politics of representation, museum/exhibition ethics, and the influence that language and visual phenomenon have on cultural constructions of truth, reality, and dreams for the future. Given this interest, she has centered decolonizing practice in her art making along with her gallery and museum-based work.

As a third culture, biracial and diasporic ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ/ white queer artist I carry my home and community inside me as memories. Those before me live in the marrow of my bones which will beget those who come after. My skin and dreams tell me stories and help me remember. My first memory is of a story, as all memories will become. By exploring embodied storytelling through the externalization of memory, trauma, and experience, my work investigates the liminal fluid identities I occupy. Operating in photographic and time-based media, I disrupt the absolutist violence cameras have perpetuated as tools which fabricate “truths” and serve as authorities of memory and dominant narratives of history. I incorporate found imagery (mining the public and familial archive), layered with process marks (remnants of literal chemistry or digital tools), and performative and constructed images to heal trauma through re-memory.

“Not What It Looks Like” from the series Siksikiinglish: Because You Do Not Have the Language to Read This…
40×26 in

La Pietá Nínaawa ómahkapi’si

Detail for Spectrum of Doubt
One in a series of 11 4×5 tinypes

Consuming Myself
23×35 inches

Motherspirit, Cradleboard and the Ghost of the Colonizer
23×35 inches