#truth #history #narrative #Afropolitan #multiculturalism #future

In an age when fact and falsehood are often indistinguishable, The Ease of Fiction is a title that gives pause. The exhibition, now at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, was curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having been invited to participate in the exhibition’s collateral programming as a speaker during its Los Angeles run, I was mistrustful of the proposition to give way to fiction, abdicating the fight for truth when the very concept is being called into question all around us. On the other hand, a fiction need not contain untruths—perhaps personal and political realities are easier or less painful to understand if represented another way. Finding such other ways of understanding was the focus of my talk with participating artist Sherin Guirguis in December 2016, and it is a question I wish to explore further here.

The Ease of Fiction, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of California African American Museum. Photo: Andreas Branch.

The exhibition of four artists at the California African American Museum incorporates nonlinear narratives, representation, and abstraction into its definition of “fiction.” Yet for the most part, the subject matter mined by the artists is historical or autobiographical. As such, the underlying assumption is that fiction might be truth offered under a different name. In Guirguis’ large-scale paintings on paper, the Egyptian-born artist makes reference to the mashrabiya screens at Huda Shaarawi’s residence and in the windows of the Cairo train station where the early-20th-century feminist activist removed her veil in defiance of the mandate that men dictate the terms of her body. These are verifiable historical facts and real places. Still, the rich, drip-streaked marks of Guirguis’ paintings, and the soft glow of vermilion that emanates from behind their intricately cut surfaces, suggest an alternate understanding that prioritizes intuition, embodiment, and affect over official narratives.

One truth that proves to be a fiction is that of cultural uniformity among communities of African heritage, a notion promoted through midcentury Pan-Africanist and Caribbean discourse as a counter-narrative to the totalizing universalism of European cultural values. Such idealizations of Africa overlook the continent’s racial, geographic, and linguistic diversity, resulting in well-meaning but primitivizing assumptions from Americans of all races who fail to recognize the cosmopolitanism of the continent. The Ease of Fiction is notable because it expands CAAM’s constituency of African Americans to include artists born in Africa who later emigrated to the United States. Their inclusion brings a vision of Afropolitanism—of a multicultural, urban, globally connected continent—to an institution anchored in America’s Black traditions.

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From our sister publication Art Practical today we bring you an article published in Issue 8.1: Art & Citizenship. Author Genevieve Quick considers Khaled Jarrar’s ongoing project Live and Work, which interrogates the borders between Palestine and Israel, and Mexico and the United States. Quick states, “As larger geopolitical issues are debated between international politicians, Jarrar uses art to enact seemingly small gestures that empower himself as an individual, resulting in a dialogue with the everyday.” This article was originally published November 10, 2016.

Khaled Jarrar. Khaled’s Ladder, 2016; made from parts of the Mexico/USA border. Courtesy of CULTURUNNERS.

As a naturalized citizen, I have crossed international borders as an immigrant and a traveler. My passport verifies my citizenship, tracks my travel, and, as an American, grants me a largely unfettered freedom of movement around the world. For many of us, economic and time constraints may prevent travel, but for others—regardless of their merit, character, or intentions—their very citizenship is an obstacle to entering some countries. While the world’s increasing interconnectedness is widely celebrated, many countries have responded with strict immigration limits, bureaucratic hurdles, or the construction of physical walls.

Palestine’s status as a partially recognized or disputed country is subject to external governments that, in addition to other powers, can regulate the flow of people within the region and further abroad. Through performance and sculpture, artist Khaled Jarrar investigates the ways that passports and borders separate, define, and limit us. Provocatively, the artist also creates ways to transgress borders, breaking them down from the larger geopolitical apparatus into individually manageable acts. Emerging out of his own experience in Palestine, Jarrar’s practice has expanded to internationally site-specific projects that address global issues of migration and our shared concerns and struggles.

Read the full article here.

Today we bring you Jing Cao’s Shotgun Review of From Two Arises Three, which featured the collaborative work of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney. As the author describes, the artists crossed divides of medium, culture, and even time period as they redefined and reformed traditional Chinese landscape paintings in their own unique visual language. Sometimes, pausing to reflect upon moments of connection is worth the reminder that it’s possible, and sometimes gazing at contemporary yet ethereal landscapes is exactly the thing to do on a Friday. This article was originally published on October 12, 2014.  

Michael Cherney and Arnold Chang. After Huang Gongwong 4, 2009 (detail); photographic inkjet print and ink on paper. From the collection of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang. Courtesy of the Artist and Asian Art Museum. Photo: Jing Cao.

Chinese landscape painting is notoriously inaccessible—the format is foreign, the subject deep in historicity, the materiality unassuming. Photography, on the other hand, is eminently familiar—a daily practice for many in the digital age. Enter From Two Arises Three, an exhibition of painter Arnold Chang and photographer Michael Cherney’s collaborative works at the Asian Art Museum.

At first blush, From Two Arises Three resembles a traditional landscape exhibition. Black-and-white hanging scrolls line the gallery walls; paper fans and album leaves fill cases in the center. But look closer and a genuinely contemporary collaboration begins to unfold. Many images are actually composites, with Cherney’s grainy, out-of-focus photographs bleeding into Chang’s traditional landscape painting. In a video interview that accompanies the show, Chang and Cherney describe their process: Cherney travels across China, taking photographs. He mails these to Chang’s studio in New Jersey, where they are printed onto xuan paper. Chang then extends the imagery with ink and brush. Like an exquisite corpse, Chang’s paintings grow out of Cherney’s photographs.

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In this time of rapid environmental decline, visual depictions of landscape can become sites for critical positioning. Marcus James’s 2015 works encapsulate the disjuncture between a desire for pristine, solitary experiences in nature and the technological interventions that reveal this desire as pure fantasy. But rather than present a crass comment on this contradiction, James’s pieces offer a possibility outside of the binary constructed between “pure” nature and the “polluting” human effect. James’s landscape drawings demonstrate how a person’s experience of being in nature is a relational, iterative process, one that is neither free from cultural construction nor extant without it.

Marcus James. Garnedd Ugain, 2015; graphite pencil on Fabriano paper; 950 x 750 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Named for the hills and mountains James hiked around Great Britain, the drawings depict spaces that are remote, austere, and difficult to access—all quintessential characteristics of places in which a supposedly natural experience can be had, which is to say places that feel removed from the strictures of culture, society, and technology. Such places are seen as offering reprieve from the overwhelming demands of human society, allowing people to get in touch with themselves again. The logic of this thinking necessitates a belief that both the person and the natural environment exist first as holistic states that are later shaped and marred by manufactured interventions; humans and nature are the raw materials that are distorted by culture and technology.

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In A Matter of Fact at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, Toyin Ojih Odutola presents an elaborately conceived and completely imaginary history of the UmuEze Amara clan, as chronicled in a series of portrait drawings in pastel, charcoal, and pencil. A wall text in the main gallery states that these works were selected from the family’s extensive holdings of art and antiquities by the present Marquess (a title of nobility, sometimes spelled marquis, designating a rank below a duke but above a count). By focusing on this specific part of the fictitious family’s collection, the text tells us that the Most Honorable Jideofor Emeka and his husband Lord Temitope Omodele hope “[t]o engage visitors in the experience of life within a great Nigerian house as well as present an intimate family portrait beyond the public image of respectability.”

Toyin Ojih Odutola. The Marchioness, 2016; charcoal, pastel, and pencil on paper; 77 x 50 in. (paper), 83 3/8 x 65 7/8 x 2 in. (framed). Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Signing her name to this statement as “Deputy Private Secretary” to the family, Ojih Odutola sets in motion a story told in pictures: a graphic novel of sorts about indolent aristocrats surrounded by the trappings of wealth. In the brightly colored, high-ceilinged rooms she has imagined, gold becomes a framing device. It surrounds the many pictures hung everywhere, is woven into rugs and drapes, and even covers the molding that decorates most of the walls. There are gold buttons, watches, pens and piping, a gold cup and teapot, and even what appears to be a cloth-of-gold dress.

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I admit that I’m late to discovering Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. However, given that she has been producing work since the 1980s, and only in 2016 has received her first major retrospective in New York, Pixel Forest at the New Museum, I may not be the only one. The exhibition as a whole is an immersive environment, where one can easily and pleasurably lose time—an attitude that fits Rist’s individual works.

Pipilotti Rist. Ever Is Over All, 1997; two-channel video and sound installation, color; 4:07; dimensions variable. Sound by Anders Guggisberg and Rist. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Ever Is Over All (1997) first reeled me in—a video vignette that received extra pop-culture attention this year when one of Beyoncé’s music videos from Lemonade cited it. In Rist’s video, a White woman wears a light blue dress and red pumps. She grins euphorically as she struts down a sidewalk, carrying a cast-metal replica of a flower. She repeatedly swings the flower into the windows of parked cars, glowing all the while. A White female police officer passes her and nods approvingly. In this utopian wonderland, a (White) woman is free to move about public space as she pleases, with an expression of what might be a gesture of female rage. It’s a mixed bag (which Beyoncé’s video emphasizes): Are we expected to smile through the pain? Is our anger only acceptable when it is aesthetically pleasing?

Throughout the four floors, Rist’s recurring themes of gender, nature, and human bodies emerge through differing strategies in video and multimedia installations. Rist’s tactic of spatially manipulating the viewing experience repeats throughout. For example, a collection of Rist’s video pieces is viewable only by inserting one’s head into triangular boxes that protrude from the walls. There is no disembodied viewing here, as viewers must feel themselves move in order to watch.

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Amy Reidel’s solo exhibition, Radar Home, 11.8.13, takes its name from the date her mother received a doctor’s call. A week later, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma—an incurable though treatable blood cancer. Though her mother has since recovered and is now cancer-free, this decisive moment in Reidel’s personal life unifies the wide-ranging works of painting, digital prints, video, sculpture, and installation on view at the Sheldon Art Galleries. Radar Home, 11.8.13 is poignant, but not depressing, as it evokes cautious optimism instead of despair. Reidel’s colorful palette and use of craft materials underscore the lighthearted humor in her work.

Amy Reidel. Tumor Storm, 2016; loose glitter and colored sand on printed vinyl; dimensions vary. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Johnson Photography.

Several pieces are peppered along the hallway that runs from the entrance of the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery within the Sheldon. Some are displayed independently, while others are clustered together. In Puking Roses (2016), fake roses are arranged in single file on a wall, vomiting tinsel that hangs like ringlets of green snot. Reidel’s grandmother is loosely painted on an irregularly shaped piece of canvas tacked to the wall in Pink Grandma and Kleenex Crown (2016). The subject’s hair is fluorescent pink and adorned with crumpled tissues and fake flowers. Two small assemblages, titled Tumors (2016), are beautiful conglomerations of handmade geodes, crystals, fake flowers, shredded snapshots, tinsel, and cut paintings. The works’ title and context shifts their beauty, and they become sinister knickknacks. One rests on a white shelf; the other hangs above like a Christmas ornament.

Halfway down the hallway, and to the right, a wide doorway opens to another part of the gallery, which is divided into three sections. Each one of these rooms has its own installation. In the center space, a large mandala of loose glitter and colored sand is composed with painstaking precision on a low, broad platform. The design of this work, Tumor Storm (2016), is roundish, asymmetrical, and organic—a composite of a colored MRI scan and weather radar. Multiple colors clash and complement each other as distinct shapes edge against one another.

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