N8 DeVivo is a visual artist working primarily with photography and text based out of Portland Oregon. Graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute and taking part in the Bay Area’s DIY scene, N8 has participated in numerous group shows, curated exhibitions, worked as an assistant to established artists and has been included in publications such as ID, Juxtapoz and Foglifter. Raised on a commune in rural Nebraska to white preachers their practice focuses on their evolving relation to Blackness, Spirituality, and Queerness and is seen by the artist as a “means of becoming” their authentic self.
On Becoming
I keep returning to the images of my outstretched hands reaching for something that I’ve imagined to be without. I reached for a sense of belonging to a timeless space that was greater than myself and growing up the only words taught came from a god with skin unfamiliar to me. Being raised Black in rural Nebraska I had no traditions to return to thus creating these images became a way of forming my own language as a means to reach within and find truth.I spoke to my real self. Ever since then, I’ve only been speaking to myself. I speak to myself when I speak to others as much as I do when I am alone. In this quiet I’m left with a feeling of an eternal existence in space that surpasses time, materializing the moments of time between moments of time, and the balance connecting deep pain and extreme bliss. Transforming into the divine, I am omnipresent and make every place my home, I become god in this space: the pause between the clap. This project is documentation of that search; it’s the moments of finding beauty, it’s the times I’ve failed, it’s me reaching for a God and finding them within, and it’s the conversations with myself when I’m real.
To view more of N8 DeVivo’s work please visit their website.