December 7, 2023 – January 25, 2024
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collectively curated by dove bardin, helena bode, aurora chen,
mahealani deenik, jasper freeman, mia goldstein, benji hsu,
caroline larsen, tomas mp, natalie mell, meg nicolaou,
annabelle pollack, carmella rennell, grazzi simonsen, gary whitt
I THREW MYSELF IN A CONCRETE MIXER is a testament to the strength and beauty found in artists representing themselves in multitudes – breaking down concrete existence and emphasizing the complexities and churnings of identity and experience. I THREW MYSELF IN A CONCRETE MIXER invites viewers to witness how artists are cultivating, celebrating, and reckoning with their own multiplicities. They account for contradictions, dreaming futures that make and unmake us– capturing the ruptures and sanctuaries of our histories.
This exhibition gathers ephemeral, often discarded histories together into new shapes, materializing hopeful forms reaching toward the promise of something greater than what is known. It is a defiant refusal to be confined to the linearity of imperialism and its history. Artists are working to reach beyond, before, and through the shutter of the imperial gaze to represent themselves in new ways.
In her Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the consequences of narrow-minded views of a person or place, using the example of her homeland, Nigeria, and speaking to how the diverse continent of Africa is represented narrowly in western literature. Today, with the onslaught of information and access, especially in the form of media, there are more stories being shared than ever. Some content can be shocking, disturbing, even contentious, but our collective attitude in moving away from the long-held single story, is essential. And the identities of continents and nations, such as the USA, are becoming more and more complex. National American identity is a theme rejected or reworked in many artists’ work. Through these reworkings and disruptions, they are able to uncover their own multiplicity, multitudes of stories, and deeper humanity. Artists are also able to take these stories and develop them through dreaming, building imagined futures where hope and new landscape emerge for themselves and others. This results in art with playfulness, sometimes absurdity, and humor, but most importantly, exposed narratives that reject and transform accepted truths.
The construction of history as a monolith is a violent act, erasing the beauty and multiplicities of those who seek to work against western imperial notions of identity. In her book Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay discusses the violent abstractions which occur in the production of imperial knowledge systems as a shutter. “The petty sovereign asserts itself at that moment as preceding and separate from the photographic event, from the participants, and from the situation out of which a photograph is about to be extracted.”1 In this way, she is asserting that the action of the shutter, the concretizing of a single, particular, and exclusionary state, is the modus operandi of imperial conquest. It abstracts meaning from a particular vantage at the expense of those in the camera’s view. The very origins of imperialism are “found in the repetitive moments of the operation of imperial shutters.”2 However, she goes on to posit the idea that intrinsic within that exclusionary moment created by the operation of the shutter, there is an unseen and always present rebellion. A refusal of those whose lives are being violently abstracted for the sake of their own destruction to be dormant and submit to this act against them.3
Azoulay outlines the action of the imperial shutter as being three-fold, “in time (between a before and an after), in space (between who/what is in front of the camera and who/what is behind it), and in the body politic (between those who possess and operate such devices and appropriate and accumulate their product and those whose countenance, resources, or labor are extracted.)”4 It is against these separations that we must fight and collapse the temporal, local, political boundaries that separate our understandings. We celebrate the multitudes and unravelings of existence that the imperial shutter seeks to eliminate.
In Orientalism, Edward Said first honors the settings that formed him, recognizing Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon as those places in the preface. He addresses that the book is connected to the “tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history,” coining the term “the Orient” to visualize and position certain peoples and societies as a fantasized and alienated subject defined by “the West.” Said expands a key difference in the way knowledge is produced and shared–– there can be a desire to understand “for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizon” and a wielding of knowledge “to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons”.5 From his book emerges the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended and if it proliferates in countries that claim to be the prime example of civilization. Said presents “a way of coming to terms with the Orient based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” Said places an imaginative quality on the Orient and how it helped to define Europe “as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Said uses occupations in Iraq, the violence of the Lebanese Civil war, and the displacements of Palestinians to describe the violent and current unfoldings of orientalism that traces back to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt of the late eighteenth century. History and its malleable character constructs the Empire and along with the making of the “other.” Thus, there is always an opportunity where history can be unmade and rewritten. I THREW MYSELF IN A CONCRETE MIXER echoes the same demands and efforts to reconstruct visions, languages, and survivals of home, self, and identity collectively and intimately.
The artist Tourmaline, while in conversation with Imara Jones, for the TransLash Podcast, speaks of the importance of recognizing history and acknowledging those who came before as a guidepost for the presence and possible futures being dreamed up through art. Tourmaline re-emphasizes the importance of what stories are being told, who is telling them, and the importance of artists representing themselves in all their multiplicitous glory. Freedom dreaming emerges as the ability to visualize and enact possible futures. In her piece Pleasure Gardening (2021), Tourmaline uses sound as a way of reviving and exhuming the spirits and bodies of forgotten histories embedded in the physical and cultural foundations of New York City, re-activating physical sites and fighting against the violence of progress in order to reveal histories erased by the violent shutters of the past.
How then are artists left to reckon with this violence? How are artists working to fight back against this exclusionary notion of history in order to represent themselves outside of imperial modes of understanding? We honor Billy Gerard Frank’s use of ephemera to capture his family in the histories of the Empire Windrush generation, documenting the travels and relationships of people who emigrated from the Caribbean to Britain starting in the 1940s. We witness Benji Hsu’s photographic fragmentation of himself as he explores identity, caught between the desire to belong to the Asian American community and the desire to assimilate into American culture. In a vibrant scene, Von Hyin Kolk reappropriates material histories of the canvas to forefront the absurdity arising from her presence in landscapes and aesthetics built off of the consumption of her own people. The presence of Tasneem Sarkez’s childhood shoes and the absence of the person that was once in them indicate the artist’s transformation as a child of diaspora, the object’s memorialization of her and home––one’s foot can be in many places. Gary Whitt places fractured, melded cyanotypes in line with the idea of data corruption; how it can cause images to become distorted and combined, their work plays with and blurs the spatial and temporal boundaries of where they call home.
Through vibrant remakings and insertions of themself in surreal and colorful scenes, Chris Cortez reworks their canvas to celebrate their fluid expression of self-resilience, heritage, and memory. Mosa Zhao emerges an ethereal world of her own making through a collection of drawings that play with contradiction of illusion and personal realities––a hybridization of her, places in dreams, mystery and myth, and the non-human. The legs Dove Bardin presses along the borders of the gallery’s physical space resurrects scenes from the 1970’s occupation of NYU’s Weinstein Hall after the school canceled a scheduled queer fundraising dance, speaking on the appropriation of queer imagery by downtown Manhattan’s prominent institutions. Natalia Bermeo knits together her Ecuadorian heritage with contemporary forms, fashioning her and her family’s background with new bodies and orientation of design. Lyle Ashton Harris collages ongoing exploration of the historical and contemporary cross-currents of Italian and African influence, mirroring the layered meanings and associations of race and adornment with the physical orientation of his work. Within this body of work, there is an infinitude of reclaiming histories and materials from the confinements of physical, psychological, and institutional conditions. Prying open the shutters which seek to limit the ways they express experience, these artists demand with bare hands for the viewer to look again with a new, perhaps curious gaze.
Artists are using their dream to depict new narratives constructing transformative spaces that resist conceptualizations of home, nation, and peoples as stationary. As artists carve out avenues for themselves beyond the boxes that have been made for them, as they mend and disrupt their dissonances and assonances with identity, self and place, there is a shifting in architecture of their home, self, and messages they convey. They resist the narrow way the world has been molded, expanding the present moment through their art, working to encompass the multiplicities of their identities, and opening along with activating spaces for the continuation and pride of their futures.
(Essay written by: Mahealani Deenik, Carmella Rennell, & Gary Whitt)
Footnotes
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, Verso Books, 2018, pg. 14
- ibid pg. 17
- ibid pg. 17-20
- ibid pg. 14
- Said, Edward, Orientalism, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1978 Preface & Introduction