REFLECTIONS ON A THEME: TRANSPARENCY SHADE: SEEING THROUGH THE SHADOW
By Charlotte Eyerman, Ph.D. Art Historian and Independent Curator
Hank Willis Thomas, Resting, 2014
Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery
Written in conjuction with the exhibition Transparency Shade
The artists featured in Transparency Shade: Seeing Through the Shadow address crucial matters of seeing and being seen. They create in various modes and media, respectively engaging with and transforming traditions of making images and objects, positing questions about the relationship of the artist to the subject and to the viewer. The exhibition convenes diverse riffs on the thematics of vision and visibility in photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, and installation. United under the thematic umbrella conceived by the curator, artist Modou Dieng, the artists propose and subvert viewers’ perceptions and expectations.
Within the thematic framework set forth by this group exhibition, the artists’ works are convened together like soloists producing a concert. Visual and thematic baselines of gender and racial identity and experience link this diverse assembly of works. Individually and collectively, they express the consistent mining of and reference to artistic precedents and serve as a highly-focused archive of art historical and contemporary cultural sources. By combining two-dimensional works (Hank Willis Thomas, Ayana V. Jackson, and Michael Riedel) with three-dimensional ones (Kendell Carter, Zoë Buckman, Philip Aguirre, and Kahlil Irving), curator Modou Dieng orchestrates a multi-tonal discursive and visual experience. Directly or indirectly, all the works in this exhibition reference the body and temporality, creating wholly contained, richly suggestive narrative worlds within their frames or physical bounds.
The artists represented in the exhibition present works that invite us to explore assumptions about identity beyond gender and race and to pointedly interrogate our positions as viewers. Each object in the exhibition puts the viewer into a questioning mode. The space between the creation of the works and the reception of them in the gallery space is a shadowy territory. Viewers encounter images, narratives, and materials that together create a chorus of inquiry. On the surface, meanings may seem apparent, yet the longer we look and experience these works together as a landscape that challenges certainty, the more we can question and strive to understand.
The artists draw on and appropriate subject matter and visual references from a broad array of historical, literary, contemporary, and artistic sources, each in his or her distinctive personal mode. Works by Willis Thomas, Jackson, Carter, Buckman, and Aguirre depict bodies or assert “embodiedness” via genre-bending photograph- ic or sculptural approaches. While Willis Thomas’ and Jackson’s photographs lean toward the group or individual portrait, they suggest depths of story-telling, layers of memory, meaning, and relationships that are deep beyond the figures they represent. In Willis Thomas’ photographs, he creates narratives that evoke the documentary traditions of earlier generations of African American photographers, such as P.H. Polk and Roy De Carava. His compositions likewise resonate (to my eye, trained in French painting) with those of 19th-century Realist painters Gustave Courbet or Jean Millet in Resting and with the wilting women in Jacques-Louis David’s Brutus (1789) in Amelia Falling. While I would not assign these associations to the artist’s intentions, necessarily, the stories he tells are unique to his vision and they also connect to broader narratives in the history of art. We see through the transparency and shade of our own lived experience and accretion of knowledge. Encountering new images and ideas contributes new references and nuances, shadows and light, to what we know and perceive—or think we do. These 21st-century photographs occupy their own space and claim their own meanings, knitted together with centuries of tradition, as well as to recent histories and events on both public and private stages.
Likewise, Ayana V. Jackson’s works are complex meditations on the relationship between artist, subject, and viewer, as she takes charge of all three domains in casting herself as subject and author and viewer, inserting herself into her compositions. Jackson advances the notion of self-portraiture without gimmick or pretense, experimenting with notions of singularity and repetition. Her works assert the proactive power of the black female body, mind, and gaze within the artist’s studio and beyond.
While Jackson plays with the idea of the represented and multiplied self, the sculptural works in the exhibition substitute parts for the whole to evoke stories of self-fashioning, self-presentation, self-protection, myth-making. For example, Carter’s display of bronzed shoes resonates with the worlds of fashion, retail, and branding, from the women’s high heels to the athletic and street shoes that signify a broad spectrum of gendered and socially-inflected identities. From feet to hands, Zoë Buckman’s boxing gloves fashioned from satiny wedding gowns and women’s foundational garments propose stories of gender-based oppression and resistance in which implied violence and conventional notions of feminized beauty co-exist.
Taking a step away from the overtly personal, Aguirre’s objects and installa- tion combine the human form with those of animals and artifacts to reference past moments and events that, while rooted in the objects’ historical specificity, nonetheless carry resonances that evoke aspirations to universality, as if housed in museums. Likewise. Irving’s installation riffs on the Duchampian notion of the objet trouvé, orchestrated and re-deployed by the artist within the confines of the studio and then re-re-created again in the gallery space to offer an experience at once familiar and quotidian with the distancing mechanism of the gallery exhibition.
Conceptualism is another strong note in the exhibition, particularly in the latter work, as well as in the text-based, graphic works by Willis Thomas and Riedel. Willis Thomas’ I Am A White Agitator is ironic in its deadpan tone and aggressively assertive with these five words in red, block letters. Given the tensions of the current moment in American political culture (and beyond), not to mention the decades’- and cen- turies’-long struggles for political and economic racial equality, these five words in 2017 contain multitudes. Is the “white agitator” for or against the current tides? Is the agitator a force for positive change, for maintenance of a status-quo, or for a nefarious return to white supremacy? The words speak for themselves and simultaneously pose more questions than they answer. Willis Thomas has mined these themes throughout his career and the position of the artist is to advocate for uncomfortable and necessary inquiry. How viewers respond, and may answer it for themselves, depends heavily on their position and who they imagine the “speaker” to be. The image, breathtaking in its simplicity—red letters on a white background—is extraordinarily complex.
Similarly, albeit in a different key, Riedel’s works resonate (to my eye) with early 20th-century modernism, reflecting strains of Bauhaus design principles and Russian Constructivism, imbued with sly references to John Baldessari. In the deployment and repetition of the word “color,” punctuated by hued circles and geometric designs, Riedel’s works are at once formalist statements and deeper mediations beyond content and form. Riedel’s works in this context place “color” into a broader discourse that nods to our awareness of “color” as a categorical signifier (as in Pantone charts and relating to the history of color theory), while maintaining a distilled distance from color as a racial construct, per se. Color and form are the lingua franca of art and Riedel’s presence in this group show invites us to look at his compositions through a new lens, inflected by the visual dialogues created within the gallery space. These works would generate different responses if presented without the voices and visions of the other artists in the show joining the chorus, illuminating and obscuring each other’s contributions.
The exhibition‘s two modalities—optical/pictorial and physical/tactile-- shake up viewers’ notions of seeing and experiencing. Curator Modou Dieng and the artists convened by the thesis of this exhibition invite us to question notions of transparency and opacity—what is seen, known/hidden, unknown, literal/implied. These categories of human experience are inextricably connected. Perhaps the only “answer” in encountering these works is to embrace the contradiction that shadows and light depend upon one another and neither is possible without the other. From Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic to the complexities and challenges of the present day, these artists challenge us to reassess where we stand and how we see.