I define myself as a digital craftsperson because I am invested in the working relationship between me and the tools I employ. By implicating myself and these tools as collaborators in my making process, I investigate the role of authenticity, effort, and agency in my work. I’m interested in the fault lines, slippages, and second viewings stemming from opaque understandings of my work linked to labor. Intertwined with this, is my interest in Blackness and how it's warped, stretched, and screwed by culture. Digitally aided making allows me to realize possibilities for Blackness that were once materially and conceptually impossible.

I engage craft in my practice by using computer-aided design tools to create inversions of existing materials using additive and subtractive processes. These CAD tools function like chisels and the files I create with them are like malleable stones. I use these tools to answer questions foundational to my conceptual ethos. Can the digital hand mimic the nuances of a real one? A real hand mirror the precision of the digital? Can the digital provide a site of opacity from which Blackness can resist sight–seizure?

I attend to these works in a process that starts with 3D capture and ends with physical production. In this working cycle, my attention is spent camouflaging the features linking these works to their digital origins. This subverts traditional craft sensibilities as I choose to disguise labor and material to prioritize conceptual intent.

Njari Anderson(b. 2001, Clarendon, Jamaica) investigates sites of cultural exploitation intrinsic to Black daily life. Blurring the lines between critique and provocation--his work narrativizes subjects concerning loss, visibility, peril, and the pleasures of ambiguity.

In his practice, Anderson engages the Black quotidian, its relationship to digitally-aided methods of making, and the various lenses through which Black daily life is warped, stretched, chopped, and screwed. The Internet and his Caribbean identity are central to his practice: Black Twitter, WorldStarHiphop, WhatsApp, and #BlackLivesMatter–he navigates these spaces to resist the sense of placelessness granted to him by his Caribbean-immigrant identity. Part referential and part critical, he revisits these spaces in search of moments of pleasure, masculinity, queerness, voyeurism, exploitation, violence, grief, and resolution intrinsic to Blackness.

Aimed at embodying Black culture's malleability Anderson's trans-disciplinary practice resists easy viewing. He chooses to mask labor and material to prioritize conceptual intent. Viewing computer-aided design tools as collaborators in his practice, he creates inversions of existing materials using additive and subtractive processes. For Anderson, these CAD tools function like chisels, while the files and subsequent sculptures he creates are like infinitely malleable stones. Calling on cultural references, he allows these CAD tools to invade his extended metaphors to render richer narratives. Anderson's interest in the fault lines, slippages, and second viewings stemming from opaque understandings of his practice allows him to exist within, across, and beyond limits levied onto him by his Blackness.