9 minute read
Pop Iconoclast
ICONOCLAST POP
The delightful, disturbing disruptions of Erykah Townsend
By Carlo Wolff
The conceptual artist Erykah Townsend is blunt, has a distinctive approach to pop culture, and is on a roll. The 24-year-old Cleveland Institute of Art graduate wrapped up her fi rst solo show, “Bitter Sweet,” at SPACES. The rest of her 2022 dance card is full, with a show starting in early June at Abattoir Gallery in the Fulton-Clark neighborhood and a residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland starting this summer.
The Abattoir show, which Townsend will share with artist Alex Vlasov, is called “Cheap Thrills,” and it will vamp on ready-mades, the detritus of pop culture brands leave behind. A birthday card destined for the trash after the birthday date has passed is a readymade. Townsend loves ready-mades. They’re often the seed of her witty and cutting cultural critiques.
The moCa residency, which will culminate in October with a show of her new work, provides a $4,000 creative budget, a $2,000 stipend and $500 for travel. Also in Townsend’s moCa war chest: $1,000 for related public programs.
Her works sell for $800 to $4,000, and a part-time job as a design assistant for an artifi cial plant company in Cleveland’s Asiatown buttresses her bottom line.
Because Townsend, who is also known as E.T., fi nished college in 2020, during the pandemic, her virtual graduation ceremony was unsatisfying to her. The Feb. 12 “Bitter Sweet” opening at SPACES, a gallery in the Hingetown neighborhood of Cleveland, “felt like my BFA because I didn’t have that experience,” she tells Canvas.
The works in “Bitter Sweet,” which occupied the main gallery at SPACES,
were awash in ambiguity and duality. No matter how complex her message, Townsend’s presentation is in your face yet entertaining. Like candy, it romances the brain’s taste buds. Like candy, it harbors the threat of decay.
Here are a few snapshots from “Bitter Sweet,” which closed March 26.
“Sweet Trap” presents an unfi nished, oddly questing wall made of cardboard bricks, sheet rock, fake sprinkles, gift wrap and duct tape, anchored with what looks like a gift-wrapped bomb. “We Like Explosions,” an assemblage of gold and red ribbons and bows, evokes a party – a violent one. “Kill Shot” boasts nine weapons and tools, garishly decorated for a deadly night out. Made of toys, implements, balloons and spray paint, this particular wall hanging targets artists who lack talent. “Copycats must die!” is Townsend’s peer-directed caption for “Kill Shot.”
“E.T. is one of the most wildly inventive artists I’ve ever worked with,” says Lane Cooper, associate professor in CIA’s painting department. “I’m not saying ‘student’ here because I don’t mean student, I mean artist. Her work is fearless.
“She reminds me a bit of Andy Warhol but for this moment, right here, right now. I think she makes work about the things that she loves, pop culture. She amplifi es the things she thinks are beautiful – but running underneath the choices she makes, you can’t help see that’s she’s pulling back the curtain on the consumer culture that’s driving everything. … This moment is surreal and her work calls attention to that. You don’t just see it through her work, you experience it.”
MIXING MESSAGES
Townsend’s playful, ominous work plunders concepts and materials from pop culture, creating what could be called antisocial media.
People think of mixed media as “one piece with a bunch of mediums,” Townsend says. “I just work in different mediums.”
The media she uses vary from piece to piece, and “basically, I just do whatever I want,” she says.
Mixed media “doesn’t mean I’ll take my phone and put it on a canvas. I will work with photography one day, and one day I’ll probably just do readymades. … It’s not mixed media as in the work itself; mixed media means the whole aspect of working in different media.” She’s currently into a kind of digital painting in which she uses Photoshop on canvases she sends to be stretched and so changed yet again.
Besides actual outlets, Townsend has a virtual one in QTVC LIVE!, a shopping channel invented by Chicago artist Julia Arredondo. Designed to blur the line between art and commerce, it offers art by Cleveland’s Antwoine Washington and Chicago-based fi ber artist Vanessa Viruet. An episode highlighting Townsend’s art is set for June.
Townsend, who gets around by bus and foot, is also literally on the move, eager to settle into a studio-living space in the same building as Abattoir. Not much of a “people person,” she prefers to work by herself in her studio.
Is pop culture an alternative reality or reality itself?
“I think it’s both, because it is an alternative reality but it becomes so embedded into us that it becomes real in a way,” she says. “People spend so much on Mickey Mouse merch they make him real. People live off of pop culture.”
Disney and its subsidiary Marvel have taken over, Townsend says with neither irony nor anger. Her work is commentary on pop culture, which she sometimes loves and at other times deplores. She also uses pop culture “to criticize a main political topic, or something.” But her approach, Townsend suggests, is indirect.
ON HER OWN TERMS
The youngest child in her family, Townsend has three sisters and a brother. As the only artist in the Townsend household, she discovered her talent in preschool at Iowa-Maple Elementary School in Cleveland, when the kids had to draw “like, a Dr. Seuss picture, and I remember going overboard.” She didn’t know when to stop and she didn’t want to.
Her artistic fearlessness made her a winner in 2015, when she was a senior at the Cleveland School of the Arts and was awarded a full, four-year scholarship to CIA.
“It was one of those things where you can’t believe it happened to you,” she says of her CIA full ride. “It was great. The only thing I didn’t like is people would, like, envy me – not like a freak, but like I got everything handed to me.”
To her detractors, favoritism created her fortunate situation, not talent, she suggests. Townsend prefers her art be judged on its own merits.
Her view of her academic experience is not exactly sunny.
Above: “Kill Shot” by Erykah Townsend, on view at SPACES. Canvas Photo / Carlo Wolff Opposite page: Erykah Townsend. Photo / McKinley Wiley
During critiques in which she was praised, one CIA student would regularly tear her down, Townsend says. And when she criticized the school, she got pushback. She liked the facilities and the art at CIA, and as for the teachers, “it was 50-50.” Her fellow students? Not so appealing.
Another teacher enthusiastic about Townsend is Zachary Smoker, manager/ adjunct faculty at CIA’s Fabrication Studios. He met Townsend when she was a sophomore, and even then, “E.T. was fearless through her play and experimentation in the studio, always pushing both her own technical ability and the limits of the material itself,” he writes in an email. “I feel like there was always something new, exciting and unexpected happening in the work. The breadth of mark and strategy she employs is reflective of this tenacity.
“This aggregate of surfaces, textures, colors and pop-culture references is a hallmark of E.T.’s work. In a lot of instances, it seems it’s this playful material invention that’s driving both the conception and reception of the work’s tactility.”
Where Smoker applauds Townsend’s artistic sprawl, some pundits would like to box her into a “Black aesthetic,” she says. She doesn’t like the term, saying it segregates both in the larger society and within the Black community.
“I’m not the same as another Black person,” she says. “We’re all different.”
She recalls a Black school mate from the suburbs who acted as if he were from the “hood.” “That’s not your story,” she scolded him.
“You know how I was saying I was a misfit because if I did anything not Black, I was called white,” she says, citing listening to rock music as an example. “Whenever you don’t do a stereotypical thing Black people do, even Black people will call you, like, white.”
Townsend is not afraid to speak her piece. Count on her to continue creating testy, absorbing art that challenges the viewer to think twice – at least.
ON VIEW
• “Cheap Thrills,” featuring Erykah Townsend with Alex Vlasov, is on view starting in June at Abattoir in the Hildebrandt Building, 3619 Walton Ave., Cleveland. • Townsend’s moCa residency will culminate with a show in October. MoCa is at 11400 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.
“Sweet Trap” by Erykah Townsend, on view at SPACES. Canvas Photos / Carlo Wolff
“We Like Explosions” by Erykah Townsend, on view at SPACES.
“E.T. is one of the most wildly inventive artists I’ve ever worked with. I’m not saying ‘student’ here because I don’t mean student, I mean artist. Her work is fearless.” - Lane Cooper, associate professor, CIA
Canton Museum of Art April 26 – July 24, 2022
The exhibition Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii introduces an artist whose work opens a window to historical events, issues and ideas far greater than the individual. Fujii (1891 – 1964) bore witness to his life in America and, especially, to his World War II experience. Fujii left a remarkably comprehensive visual record of this time and offers a unique perspective on his generation – shedding light on events that most Americans did not experience, but whose lessons remain salient today.
Fujii was 50 when war broke out between the U.S. and Japan. With increasing racist propaganda, he became one of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast forced to leave their homes and live in geographically isolated incarceration camps. He and his family, together with most ethnic Japanese from Seattle, were sent first to the Puyallup temporary camp at Washington State Fairgrounds, and in August 1942 were transferred to Minidoka Relocation Center in southern Idaho.
Confronting such circumstances, Fujii began an illustrated diary, spanning 1942 to 1945. In nearly 250 ink drawings, he detailed the incarceration camps and the inmates’ daily routines. He also produced over 130 watercolors that expand upon the diary, plus several oil paintings and sculptures, notably a carved double portrait of Fujii and his wife.
After the war Fujii moved to Chicago, home to a large Japanese American community, under the government’s resettlement program. He continued painting, and later produced a series of boldly gestural black-and-white abstract expressionist paintings. These, and his 1930s American realist paintings, frame the wartime work that is his singular legacy and remains relevant today.
On view through July 24, 2022 at the Canton Museum of Art | cantonart.org | Curated by Barbara Johns, Ph.D.; Exhibition Organized by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.
Train to Minidoka, n.d. Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964). Watercolor on paper. 6.5 x 5.25 inches. Collection of Sandy and Terry Kita.
Minidoka, doctor treating Fujii for tick (another incident), n.d. Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964). Watercolor on paper. 5 x 6.25 inches. Collection of Sandy and Terry Kita
