Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Imaginarence Project

“For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact

into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.” Toni Morrison

Nathaniel Donnett’s multimedia exhibition Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Imaginarence considers how people navigate space and time through nonlinear trajectories as they explore material and immaterial worlds—and questions how abstraction reflects our realities while

offering multiple ways to perceive them. Donnett activates sacred geometries, fractals, and drum notations as communication strategies to examine the role imagination plays in contending with obstacles in our lives that manifest as systemic limitations, but also constitute nuanced moments

of discovery.

The exhibition takes inspiration from the life of Ed Dwight, a former-Air Force pilot who almost became the first Black astronaut to enter outer space but was denied because of sociopolitical interference and racial hostility. He later reimagined himself and became a sculptor. Following that path, Donnett’s works—textiles, sculpture, installation, sound, video, and, importantly, community engagement in the form of a backpack exchange with students from historic Black neighborhoods in Houston (Third Ward, Sunnyside, Acres Homes, Fifth Ward). The reclaimed backpacks become material for the work. This process combines the unknown and the embodied to search out Black cosmologies and material constellations that act as poetics, prompts, processes, and presentations for lived transformation.

Donnett approaches his practice through the lens of Dark Imaginarence, a concept of art, everyday aesthetic theory, and notion(s) of Blackness that creates through abstraction and representation while forever remaining influx and experientially poetic. The exhibition also reflects on theories concerned with fugitivity, spatial understanding, and becoming: Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which describes the house as a shelter and universe allowing for dreaming and protection; Fred Moten’s notion of enclosure and the surround, a psychological entrapment caused by social precarity; and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, an engagement with the plurality of space and time.

Donnett’s process is as much philosophical as it is musical—and concerned with how everyday actions and common materials hold memories and serve as witnesses to lived experiences. His recent works investigate tensions between the rational and the irrational, as a route for accessing

generative ways of moving, thinking, and living hidden within our subconscious that might help us reframe and redefine ourselves, while negotiating life’s constraints. Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Imaginarence asks: What could happen if we changed our questions from “What is the sum

of two plus two?” to “What is the sum of two plus a spaceship, divided by Earth, Wind & Fire’s song ‘Devotion,’ multiplied by the first half of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris?”