Sienna Pinderhughes

Sienna Pinderhughes is an image-based maker and immersive artist living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work focuses on portraiture of self, strangers and loved-ones as part of an ongoing exploration of the power of the photographic image within the personal and collective archives as they relate to past, present and future generations. Her photography is a love language and over the past decade she has developed a community-based practice, which she affectionately calls '1000 Black Portraits', where she gifts framed archival prints of the images that she has the honor of creating to friends, family and strangers. She is currently in development on two experimental shorts film-installations and the first solo exhibition of her photographic work.

Self-portraits are the portal I use to allow my subconscious mind to speak. I recognize the elements of self and stranger, physical and spiritual bodies, sacred objects, and the significance of time and place as foundational to my practice. When I create an image with myself, these intentional and deeply personal moments become some of my most authentic, vulnerable and honest forms of expression. The series ‘MASKOFF’, created in 2019, began as an effort to document a number of sculptures and masks I made since moving to New Orleans in 2012. Most of them were worn on Mardi Gras Day over the years and represent a commitment to my creativity through the use of my hands and my evolving relationship to the mask, which has deep spiritual significance for African and African-diasporic peoples around the world and more specifically in the city that I now call home.

LA