still waters run deep, 2021
Ship sails, water, blue LED lights, wood, five-channel video projection, multichannel sound, including Memory’s Blood, a poem by Jaylen Strong
Ship sails, water, blue LED lights, wood, five-channel video projection, multichannel sound, including Memory’s Blood, a poem by Jaylen Strong
In still waters run deep, Shikeith crafts an immersive, multisensory installation that meditates on the psychic interiority of Black queer men, using the language of water, light, and moving image to evoke memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Suspended sails stretch across a shallow reflecting pool, each one animated by a five-channel video projection that layers archival imagery, intimate portraits, and choreographed gestures. These sails, recalling both maritime passage and spiritual veils, become carriers of inherited and reimagined narratives.
The ambient soundscape—composed of field recordings, echoes of childhood rhymes, and the voice of poet Jaylen Strong reading Memory’s Blood—deepens the ritualistic tone of the space, guiding the viewer through cycles of reflection and release. As light ripples across the water and sails, Shikeith blurs the boundaries between past and present, the bodily and the metaphysical.
Presented as part of Imagine Otherwise, a group exhibition inspired by Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, at MoCA Cleveland, the work performs what Sharpe calls "wake work"—a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery, anti-Blackness, and historical erasure. By centering the emotional and erotic inner lives of Black men, Shikeith constructs a sacred architecture of care, defiance, and becoming. still waters run deep invites viewers into a space of remembrance and dreaming—where water becomes witness, and the act of seeing becomes a form of listening.