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THE GESTURE ITSELF IS PROTECTION SPELL

September 17, 2022 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Performative activations from current exhibiting artists R. Treshawn Williamson & Lola Ayisha Ogbara, with special guest artist Jada-Amina.

 

Borrowed from Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s video work ‘Bound For Glory’ from her continuing series The Perfect Servant, THE GESTURE ITSELF IS PROTECTION SPELL proposes questions of the body, disruption, labor, acts of looking, and materiality through movement, sound, and mythmaking.
Williamson, Ogbara, and Amina engage in multidisciplinary practices that reference homeplace, memory, and the “gaze” that take place across photography, video, sculpture, sound, and printmaking.
THE GESTURE ITSELF IS PROTECTION SPELL will feature a collaborative live sound activation by R. Treshawn Williamson and Jada-Amina followed by Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s video work ‘Bound For Glory’, in which Ogbara uses Chicago’s labor intensive history, centralizing Black women domestic workers, to envision a radical future for Black lives. Ogbara finds an additional dialogue between sculpture and experimental photography that challenges our relationship to viewership. Ogbara questions, “What lengths are we willing to go to in order to protect what is rightfully ours?” as she begins to imagine a collective disruption in the way we use our bodies to perform artistic labor.

 

In the same ways Ogbara imagines collective disruption and Black women’s labor , R. Treshawn Williamson and Jada-Amina also explore the Black maternal and cultural re-imagination through sound mixing and oral histories, through what Amina describes as “a sonic meditation grounded in incantation and afro-sentimentality…”

 

Image courtesy of Lola Ayisha Ogbara. Bound For Glory. 4 minutes 36 seconds. 2021

 

This program is the final program related to our current exhibition “…of the land: acts of refusal and ratification” , which features new and recent works from Chicago-based artists Ajmal ‘Mas Man’ Millar, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, and R. Treshawn Williamson exploring sculpture, self-imaging and history through postcolonial lenses, collective & individual recollection and peculiar materialism.

 

*Top Image courtesy of artist Jada-Amina. Revolutions. 00:01:35 min. B&W Super 8 scanned to digital, 2017.

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Date:
September 17, 2022
Time:
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.