Artist Statement:

A few years ago, while touring an abandoned manufacturing plant in Huntsville, Alabama, I had an experience that altered the course of my artistic practice. We walked beneath an old awning where a bed of red dust had settled undisturbed, perhaps for nearly a century.  As our footsteps prodded the earth, the dust rose around us like a gathering of spirits. It seemed moved with palpable presence. Fascinated, I asked the gentleman leading the tour if I could take some of the dust with me. He told me to take it all. I filled a small container, never imagining that those handfuls of red earth would become the foundation of a new body of living work.  

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Red clay is the substance of my childhood. It stained our shoes, our socks, our hands, clothes, and the winding roads that carried me through the American South. Its story is far older than my own. The same red earth stretches across continents, connecting Alabama to the ancestral landscapes of West Africa, to Yoruba traditions, and to the places from which so many stories, and so many people, began. This clay is rich with iron as are we. The iron running through our blood mirrors the iron held within the earth itself, binding us to the land in ways that are both physical and spiritual. It is impossible for me to separate the two. Every time I paint with red clay, I feel as though I am working with a living substance, not merely pigment, but memory. Not simply a medium or earth, but inheritance. To me, this clay carries the breath of those who came before us. It holds labor, joy, suffering, resilience, migration, worship, survival, and love. It remembers what history often forgets, reinterprets, or in some cases seeks to erase. When I paint with it, I am not attempting to imitate life. I am awakened it and awakening us to it. This is a space where cosmology, geology, ancestry, and spirituality intersect.

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Like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, searching for the spark that could return life to what appeared lifeless, my pursuit is not the manufacture of objects but the restoration of presence. Yet unlike Frankenstein's ambition to conquer nature, my work is an act of listening, of being. The electricity that animates these paintings does not come from machines. It comes from spirit. From ancestry. From the sacred relationship between humanity and the earth that formed us. Each painting in In the Spirit is more than an image. It is an encounter. The clay itself becomes witness and participant, carrying within it the unseen stories of generations. These paintings exist somewhere between portraiture and relic, between archaeology and prayer. They are less about representing a person than inviting their presence back into the room. 

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This is why I often say I do not simply create artworks. I resurrect truths. The red clay becomes flesh. The portrait becomes a vessel. The act of painting becomes ceremony. My studio is at one a sanctuary and a laboratory. In the Spirit is an offering to those whose lives continue to echo through the land beneath our feet. It is an invitation to recognize that the earth remembers us, that our stories are never truly buried, and that sometimes all it takes is the disturbance of a little dust for the spirits to rise once again. 

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About Jahni:

John “Jahni” Moore is a southern born visual artist. His early years were spent immersed in books, church, and nature. Through books and the natural world, he developed an insatiable desire to “know and creatively express through narrative.” He has a bachelors in graphic design and a master's degree in art education. He also holds a master's degree in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moore has taught art professionally to many age groups, from kindergarten to university level. He has created numerous murals located in cities from Chicago, Illinois USA to Colombia, South America. He served as Art Ambassador in Colombia twice, and his work hangs in Fernando Botero Library in San Cristobal, Colombia. He has shown all over the United States at venues such as Laxart in Los Angeles with Paul McCarthy and Jenny Hauser, to New York Riverside Church alongside original works by Kehinde Wiley. He works out of his studio he calls the C.H.U.R.C.H. (Come Help Us Restore Cosmic Harmony) in Huntsville, Alabama.  Jahni is committed to activating a creative paradigm shift, where purpose-driven creative achievements become the cornerstone of a thriving and interconnected global community.​