For Terence Nance, art is a conversation, a kaleidoscopic conversation that subverts the notion of genre, combining music and live action film, animation and shifting narrative viewpoints. Challenging linearity of space, time, and storytelling, he conjures alternate worlds, alternative logics and fever dreams; he weaves shape-shifting expanded consciousness and joyous conceptual inventions into the beauty, worries, ugliness, and terrors and marvels of everyday experiences (love, white supremacy…) of contemporary Black life in America.

With empathic, complex storytelling and a fantastical seamlessness between waking and dream, his vision of cinema may be seen as portal, channel, cosmic material, divination tool, decolonizing work, oratory and experimental vernacular. Extending his talent for the phantasmagoric, Nance created the late-night cable series Random Acts of Flyness. Both an act of creation and resistance, each episode featured interconnected vignettes, a radical mix of vérité documentary, musical performances, surrealist melodrama and witty animation.

Through feelings and tonality and rhythm – and channeling - Nance’s spacious work offers provocation, tenderness, wisdom, and metaphysical shelter. 

photo: Schaun Champion