Dancing in the Absence of Pain: Terence Price II

“Dancing in the Absence of Pain,” the first solo show for photographer Terence Price II, is an intimate portrait of home, family and community that speaks to contemporary black life.

Price’s first solo exhibition, organized by Diana Nawi, emerges from a tradition of street photography to document the people closest to Price, strangers he encounters in his daily life, and his Miami Gardens neighborhood.  Through it, Price, an Oolite Arts studio resident, mines the rich territory where the personal takes on shared and collective meaning.

As the title suggests, the exhibition offers glimpses into celebration and joy set against an implicit backdrop of daily life that is often defined by harsh realities. Price’s work juxtaposes allusions to sadness and difficult circumstances — economic hardship, violence, and simply the passing of time — against the intimate and vital pleasures of family and community. Presenting re-edited home movies and photographs from his family’s archive alongside his images of his family and community, Price creates work that feels both anachronistic and enduring with images that are seemingly threaded across time.

Terence Price II was born in Carol City Florida. He documents the effects of gentrification and structural inequities by capturing his own neighborhoods, showing real people living through moments of joy, stress and social strife. His film “Summer Before Spring’s End” comments on the alarming rates of black youth dying by gun violence, and received the Audience Choice Award at FilmGate Miami’s festival. Price has shown his work in Miami, New York and Chicago.