Tia Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar from Fairfield, Alabama. Her practice is grounded in interdisciplinary strategies that activate ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. UnVessel is her second iteration of a floating camera obscura, the first created in 2019 in Houston, Texas for CounterCurrent, a performance art festival. Gardner received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and is currently working on a photographic/writing project with her mother that juxtaposes questions of biopolitics, Black Southern familial memory, and geology with vignettes of extractive capitalism. She is currently a resident of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives today in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tomorrow in Minneapolis, Minnesota.