Orlando Thompson: I am There

I N R E V I E W

ORLANDO THOMPSON:

I AM THERE

The diptychs Orlando Thompson creates by placing two 35mm photographs together have become his personal tarot deck. Tarot cards provide spiritual and symbolic meaning using numerology and color, and can be interpreted through emotional feeling and intuition. I am There speaks to the viewer through this same sense of introspection and self-awareness as it presents a series of photographs taken during the past two years of Thompson’s life.

The diptychs were not compiled chronologically after the photos were developed. Thompson selected each grouping for the purpose of conveying a more complex narrative than each has on its own. This presentation of the photos in sets of two prompts the viewer to consider what connection the artist has drawn between them.

The possible meanings provided by interpreting the linked images that are set against each other adds an ambiguity similar to that provided by a tarot card.

I am There, curated at The Dark Room in St. Louis’s Midtown Grand Arts Center by Gina Grafos, tells the story of Thompson’s adventures through deserts and desert-like cities. The photos have a dry, hot atmosphere. Industrial factories occupy many of the shots. There is something to be said for the emotion that rises when we view vast industrial scenes. The effect is compounded, or at least changed, by placing these industrial images beside natural landscapes.

Thompson draws special attention to his own hands, which reach up into the foreground of several photographs. This is to say: I am black. I am the American romantic. I am the American poet.

Orlando Thompson, Landscape (image courtesy of he Dark Room)

Orlando Thompson, Fish (image courtesy of he Dark Room)

From a wall of striking black and white diptychs, one draws me in: a silhouetted woman holds a cigarette up to her lips—she is black, confident, elegant and happy. She is dressed in casual work clothes, and she smiles coyly while facing away from the camera as if turning away to conceal her identity. She drags on her cigarette. The partner photo in this diptych is an octagonal street pole with a heavily duct-taped flyer proclaiming, “LOST” above a gaping hole where the flyer’s other text has gone missing. We don’t know what has been lost: we’ve lost the notation of what was lost. And this woman doesn’t know what is lost either, although the juxtaposition of the two images makes us see them as connected in meaning. Right now, as captured, she is lost in her cigarette and doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know.

In a diptych hung above the lost/woman, titled Landscape, the artist holds a white stone up to the camera lens, showing us his soft black hand in the foreground of a desert mountain horizon. This photograph’s partner pictures a massive transmission tower, a metal structure made to conduct high-voltage electricity across long distances. The symmetrical horizon lines from one photograph to the next in this diptych result in a serene continuity.

A diptych in the black and white half of the exhibition shows an industrial power plant puffing smog clouds into the sky, and its partner image captures a similar view only framed by the passenger seat of a car facing another smokestack scene. Other black and white photographs depict rocky desert gravel, a shadow of the photographer casting his hand in a star shape, a silhouette of a basketball hoop, electric power lines dividing the sky, a rosebud whited out in a burst of light, and the bare chest, chain, chin and smile of the artist.

Half of the exhibition is printed in color. The blue hues of these photographs help tell a story. One diptych presents a Christian flag flying alone in the foreground of a dark green forest. The second image in that set captures an interaction between a white hooded sculpture holding a Christian flag and a black man eclipsed by the sculpted figure. The black man, barely visible, faces the sculpture as if in opposition.

A photograph composed of a deeply saturated blue sky above the artist’s hand mirrors the shape of a dark green, forested mountain horizon, his fingers riding the ridge. The partner to this image is a bed of rich earth with a pink pebble hidden at its heart. Other photographs are printed in verdant color, picturing lush plants. In one, the lower half of a large tropical palm stands on a hot street corner: a pile of its giant leaves has dropped to the asphalt below.

A rainbow-colored parasol blooms on the rocky beach of a river, the other side of which is an expansive grey bluff. The swimmers are all black and playing in the deep water, which glows a little bit green. The partner to this image is taken again from the passenger seat of a car from which the artist captures a red car flipped upside down on a road in the desert: two black police officers watch vigilantly as a few black workers rig it to be pulled up by a truck. Tufts of clouds float above a dark tree line in a bright blue sky.

When choosing to bring these images into one set, Thompson communicates a sense of the deeply rich and varied life of a black American. If drawn from a tarot deck this card might represent the real risks of black Americans having fun, even when things look peaceful and whimsical on the surface.

-Katryn Dierksen

www.darkroomstl.com

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