4 minute read
Curator’s Essay by Tavarus Blackmon
from A Joy Unexpected
Tavarus Blackmon
Root Division Curatorial Fellow Curatorial Fellow
Artists make themselves used to the unexpected; our present state notwithstanding. Artists must shift as the economy shifts, reinvent themselves— quickly reorganize their space, life, studio or business, and revise the image of self as the one true revision in a time of somber repose. Freethinking they may be, the artist as business has usurped the artist as freewheeling, and this new thought of identity, representation, and authorship is alive in the artists here. For example, think of A Portrait of the Artist As a Shadow of His Former Self by Kerry James Marshall (1980), and how inventing a new identity can be a way to claim authorship of self expression while living in a difficult history. But in our global and contemporary moment the artist must reconcile a way to deal with the history of art and injustice, all-the-while thinking green regarding the environment and the effects of climate change. Where is the joy in that?
The artist Daniel Alejandro Trejo uses clay and stark mark-making tools, that depict unique, bulbous, and bodily forms, and to create installations and expressions through a curatorial practice. When asked about living with a difficult past—as a shared history of violence under patriarchal and colonial institutions—Trejo insists that the past should never be “erased” and that in order to move through toward a collective future of joy—albeit unexpected and in the midst of challenge—we must face our history to move forward.
The artists in A Joy Unexpected had to face the unthinkable over the last year and move forward. They did not recoil but met the challenge with work, time in the studio, and an investigation of what their future may become while the world seemed to be changing around them. Political upheaval, environmental instability due to climate change, and challenges to voter freedom, had all been folded into the difficult year of 2020. How has the role of the artist changed regarding protest and demands for social justice? How can joy be achieved when the future and present are beset with racism, intolerance, and violence? The unexpected is everywhere, but the artist has a toolset meant to unravel the tide and wash of unknowing. In fact the artist’s question—the
interminable kernel of doubt—is a rhetorical one, leading them toward more concern in lifting the stones that reveal what is yet to be discovered. Consequently, precipitating the unknown becomes a practice.
The artists in this exhibit, loosely connected through the collective trauma of the Pandemic, wildfires that reached from California to Colorado, and the ubiquitous call for action and protest after yet another unlawful act—the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—use methods of material, concept, and high mastery to achieve what can be called joy—in the studio and within their collective lives.
Manuel Fernando Rios, an educator, painter, printmaker, and curator, used a serigraph poster with a portrait of George Floyd, as a device to combat the unknown during peaceful protests. Being a rallying cry for justice and a form of political engagement, the work also exists as Fine Art, culled from a practice rooted in cultural exchange, formal inquiry, and concern for the social dilemma. With painting that blends the tradition of modernism and Chicano symbolism, Rios creates a new vision of formalism through both history and culture.
With printmaking and alternative processes, Summer Ventis and Gabriela Yoque investigate environmental catastrophe and interpersonal turmoil. Black expression, embodiment, and abstraction are expressed in the works by Christopher Adam Williams, Shara Mays, and Jupiter the Artist. The work is joyous in reverie, boldness, and singularity, bringing us closer with its presentation of the intimate body and the expressive gesture. When asked about abstraction, representational identity, and whether these are oppositional visual languages, the artists agree that neither are these methods ‘exclusive or exclusionary.’ In fact, both act as a vehicle for expression and change, equally inherent roles in the history of painting.
This unknown and changing landscape—PostPandemic, such as virtual instruction, Zoom birthdays, and virtual galleries is not lost on these artists. Several artists in this exhibition, like Daniel Trejo, Gabriela Yoque, and Summer Ventis, mounted exhibits and facilitated virtual programming via exhibition and discussion at institutions and art spaces during the Pandemic. This shift has Ventis, a printmaker and educator, whose work in the environment with reflective tent-like structures, moves ever closer to material engagement: an ‘interaction with material,’ real-life objects, and experiences that bring joy through our being present.
In times of change, times of awkward uncertainty, and looming doubt, what is the artist’s response? Is there no more spirituality in the splash of house paint? Do we continue to pray at the altar of an image? Does the artist play coy in a time of ferocious impediment? What we find here is that their response is one of critical reflection and a delineation of how to see with one’s own joyous intention.
