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Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Arc
Arc
Arc
Coming into the MFA program I found myself very conflicted, and frankly frustrated, as to the direction I was taking with my work. My practice felt divided between a deep-seated - though largely unexplored - attachment to the process itself of drawing, and the socio-politically active side of my life that had yet to find much expression in my work.
In an attempt to resolve this divide I worked on a Hypermasculinity Series. In these works the aim was to communicate the point at which some men reach what seems like an apex in performed, clichéd masculinity that ends up becoming either 'toxic' or violently self-destructive. The glitch effect used in many of these drawings was included with the metaphor of 'heat death' in mind, whereby something evolves to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. While these works at the very least helped me to begin to re-think my practice, the results felt very limited in a consideration of the process of their making and in the feeling that the attachment to illustration was preceding the concept.
Following on from the first attempts, I began to reflect more on the process and labor of these concentrated drawing studies. Through tutorials I was given a vocabulary to verbalize and therefore focus on the notion of value in relation to labor of different kinds, and the value of the chosen subjects themselves. In many cases I gravitated towards conventionally 'low value' subjects, and treated them with an attention to detail and concentration normally reserved for more 'high value' subjects. Further, this was generally done with exclusively carbon-based, 'primitive' mediums.
Coupled with a growing fascination with Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen (more information to this point can be found in the 'Context' section), the next two works tried to logically follow on from the previous conversation about masculinity while also bringing the notion of value to the forefront. One, a charcoal rendering of an image of young Mike Tyson screenshot from a poor quality YouTube video, tried to incorporate a reading of Hito Steyerl's thoughts on the hierarchy of image quality in the digital world. The piece was done at a much larger scale (60 x 48 in) which satisfied a personal need for physicality in the process of drawing - a need which has since found some clarity in researching Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series. Simultaneously I was building a few rudimentary tattoo machines, using only elements that might be available to incarcerated prisoners, as an object-driven expression of economies of value. Further, these two pieces were an important step in opening myself up to an ethos of the 'concept driving the medium' as opposed to the reverse, something I have been guilty of for much of my artistic career.
Black Lives Matter Protests:
On the 25th of May, George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis, USA. The murder was captured on camera by an onlooker, which was uploaded and, just like the protests and movement that ensured, spread across the world like a wildfire. What started locally as a response to yet another in a long line of countless black men and women killed by police brutality in Minneapolis, a city that had historically been the subject of a variety of police reform programs, became a worldwide protest against legacies and systems of racism and oppression.
In a matter of weeks, every state in America and over 60 countries would have seen protests against the persistent legacy of racism and white supremacy. Despite the UK government and Boris Johnson's self-preservation and denial of the colonial legacy, "the UK is not innocent" - as the London protests would say.
Outside of the personal/individual work that has been and continues to be done, nothing felt more urgent than to contribute humbly and effectively to the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. There have been a couple reasons why this seemed a welcome but necessary obligation outside of basic humanity and duty, which will be outlined below:
CNN, Graphite on paper, 2020.
As explain in the Arc, the Black Lives Matter protests would be subject to the same media and governmental propaganda seen at use in the pandemic. In many ways the socio-political injustices exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic are merely a continuation of the structural racist supremacy that the BLM movement seeks to confront. As such, it seemed entirely necessary to apply the same lens to the government and media's treatment of BLM.
Secondly, the protest cries against police brutality and for the gradual defunding of police departments are representative of an abolitionist theory that I had been fortunate enough to have exposure to prior to this movement.
While to me it is absolutely vital - as a white man from the Caribbean - to humbly follow radical black leadership in every space of the movement, it feels just as important to use the preceding facts, along with the positionality of being an artist, to contribute protest art.
At the time of writing this there have been three pieces finished, and contributed to the protests in various ways - whether through sale and donation of all proceeds to bail/freedom funds for arrested protestors, given to collectives engaged in revolution, or simply by disseminating the images and catalyzing conversation and confrontation with opposing views.
One titled, CNN, is an amalgamation of protestors from various cities in the US hijacking and claiming a giant sculpture outside of the CNN Headquarters. The aesthetics of protest art have always involved imagery that is unambiguous. This was one of the driving notions behind all three pieces to date, whether in 1312 - where two policemen with pig ears creeping from their riot helmets pepper-spray a kneeling protester - or in New Statues - where a black ballerina raises a first of solidarity while standing atop a re-claimed colonial monument. This unambiguity is echoed in the titles of each work. As is indicated in the critical analysis of James Baldwin, we must abandon the illusion of art being apolitical and instead embrace the responsibility that entails.
The UK government is currently aiming to delegitimize protests through strategies not unlike those used against various social uprisings throughout history. Strategies that for example include what Malcolm X described as 'divide and conquer' or Martin Luther King Jr. coined in the 'outside agitator myth'. Present examples of this include Secretary of State Priti Patel calling those attending protests "thugs", Boris Johnson himself saying that the movement has been hijacked by "extremists", pushing legislation that would allow '10 year prison sentences' for toppling monuments that may celebrate colonialism, or the UK Police Chief claiming - "for fear of civil unrest" - that mass gatherings should be criminalized at a time when the right to protest is as important as ever.
In the drawing CNN, the viewer finds a united front of protestors responding to the propaganda of the State by surpassing and occupying the giant sculpture of the CNN logo. In 1312, we see that the first act of violence is from the police - the original slavecatchers in America and original oppressor of worker's unions in the UK.
From a critical standpoint, I am trying to continuously refine my focus within the work I contribute to activist movements, so to be more helpful and effective. For example, it is clearly not my place to try and represent or reproduce the black experience within my work. White men have been the narrators, image-makers, and historians across the board of history. While this is something I have been trying to come to terms with for years, the process of contributing art to BLM reminded me again of this fact. So I am continuing to seek ways to elevate the movement without co-opting it, finding my place within it, while also being humbly aware of the space that I may take up within it.
Practically speaking, within this series of work I actively avoided using imagery that may be appropriative and as such made an effort to focus on the abolitionist perspective to BLM. Going forward I think it is important to contribute work that is more graphic and impactful from a distance, and easily disseminated for free, to be used by others if needed. This could involve information pamphlets, protest signs, flags, or the like.
1312, Graphite on paper, 2020.
New Statues, Graphite on paper, 2020.
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