Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ practice is situated in documenting, observing, and creating with and within the African diaspora. Her practice weaves a common thread through the African diaspora to visualize the vastness of the geo-socio-political undertaking of the transatlantic slave trade’s cultivation, harvesting, production, and distribution of sugar. She uses photography to follow ancestral leads, tie up loose ends, and confronts the dead ends of history by making photographs to insist on our existence.
Everything Nice by Sasha Phyars-Burgess is a long-term photography project that travels to ports, agricultural sites, and other locations along routes of the transatlantic slave trade, connecting the history of sugarcane agriculture past and present to the African diaspora. And, as a first-generation Trinidadian, answers the question: “What were my ancestors doing during slavery?”
The title of the exhibit offers a dual allusion. First, the title alludes to the refrain in the popular nineteenth children’s nursery rhyme (“What are little girls made of/Sugar & spice & all things nice”). In contrast to the innocence captured by the nursery rhyme, this exhibit emphasizes the violence inherent in the far-reaching sugar cane industry that fueled the labor demand for enslaved Africans to work the fields and sugar factory production in order to meet the commercial demand for sugar in the colonies in Portugal, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Florida and Louisiana. Second, the title alludes to the song by the same title popularized by Jamaican Dance Hall artist, Popcaan, that emphasizes the need, even in traumatic circumstances, to reclaim autonomy in the present moment.