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STATEMENT:

Xavier Scott Marshall is a first-generation Trinidadian-American artist born and based in New York. Xavier’s large format black and white images of decontextualized Christian icons, saints, and martyrs across various cities in the US and Europe reflect the colonial history of religious image-making to question and draw parallels between visual history and the black condition. His hand-processed film images bare the blemishes of the medium, with scratches and marks speaking to the honesty and fragility of his process and the subjects in his photographs. While taking cues from modern black life, using black religion as a vehicle, Xavier traces the lines of the past to create a new perspective and attempt to undo the colonial violence of religious image-making and its influence on our perception of the world.