Rehema Barber’s Director’s Choice exhibition at Power House,
“Everywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere,” packs multiple existential,
emotional, and visceral punches. Five talented local artists and six
nationally noted painters, sculptors, and videographers explore our
increasingly complex world and the often overwhelming sensory stimuli
flowing through its cell phones, cables, and cyberspace 24/7.
The words “Real Niggas Don’t Die” are hand-stenciled across the face
of RNDD: Tupac, Charles Huntley Nelson’s large acrylic painting
of the car in which Tupac Shakur was killed. Mounted nearby are
Polaroid images of tourists posing in front of the painting. The hollow
braggadocio of Nelson’s graffiti and the photo-ops of Tupac’s fans
suggest we are more titillated than moved by the death of this
multitalented rapper, actor, and philanthropist.
Red vinyl ribbons flow out of Joel Parsons’ 3-foot mound of latex,
acrylic, oranges, and incense work titled A Secret I Wouldn’t Know
How To Tell. In the exhibition’s most evocative site-specific
touch, the tattered ribbons cross the floor and trail into one of Power
House’s singed, crumbling furnaces.
The rich textures and colors of Keith Anderson’s burned-and-broken
phonograph record As Africa Turns remind us that nature’s decay
can be beautiful. Anderson’s unorthodox and formally satisfying
sculpture is also richly metaphoric. As Africa Turns (as the
world turns, as the music industry turns) evokes royalties that have
been lost, African-American recording artists who have been burned, and
lives that have been broken by the world of entertainment.
Keith Anderson
Jack Dingo Ryan explores what happens when we stop listening to
ourselves and each other. At first glance, Ryan’s delicately fluted,
ivory-white polyurethane ears (hundreds of them) seem out of sync with
the work’s title, Blood and Guts Forever. By adding two
noticeably turned-off light switches to the piece, Ryan’s installation
becomes, in part, an unsettlingly original metaphor for what happens
when we stop communicating, stop valuing creative output, and, instead,
measure success with military power, including the time-honored
tradition of tallying battle kills with piles of severed ears.
The show’s allusions to Greek gods and biblical figures remind us
that the desire to make our mark and find our place in the world is an
ancient one. In Mary and Jonathan Postal’s montage of antique photos,
Vulcan Forging Wings, an African-American blacksmith forges
metal in his workshop next to images of a precariously tilted tenement
and a large bin of tires, worn-out and discarded like the blacksmith’s
ancestors who worked the plantations, chain gangs, and backbreaking
jobs of industry.
broken As AfricaTurns
The image of an African American just coming into his own as a
skilled artisan poignantly parallels Vulcan’s refusal to return to
Olympus to serve the gods, choosing instead to remain in the underworld
forging works of great beauty. Pigmented beeswax heightens the
intensity of the narrative. Sweat on the blacksmith’s nearly naked body
glistens. The red that oozes into the bottom of one of the iridescently
white wings looks as fresh as blood just spilled, somewhere in the
world, in the ongoing struggle for freedom.
The videos in the show provide important insights for understanding
and surviving our multicultural world. Tall, lean Massai warriors
dancing and models slinking along a catwalk in Brendan Fernandes’
digital video Aya Mama demonstrate humankind’s desire — in
every country and culture — to adorn itself, to strut its
stuff.
The two teenagers in Kambui Olujimi’s video Night Flight
create a room (or rooftop) of their own by rendezvousing in the middle
of the night on top of a Brooklyn apartment. They make their own music
and create their own dance steps as one of the teens, ebony body
swaying with boom box in hand, moves in tandem with
his fair-skinned roller-skating partner.
Dwayne Butcher’s digital video Partagas both lampoons and
pays homage to his redneck heritage. Instead of a hot tub, Butcher
mellows out in a makeshift pool in the back of his pickup drinking Dos
Equis and smoking fine cigars.
At one point in the video, Butcher places his feet flat on the bed
of his red truck, hoists his body, and pours golden liquid from two
cans of beer across his torso to the slow measured sounds of classical
music.
With his signature mix of stand-up comedy, confessional poetry, and
absurdist theater, Butcher describes his worldview in his artist’s
statement for the show:
“I think I will be okay as long as I can keep making digital videos
with the personality of a redneck hillbilly drinking beer naked in the
back of a truck.”
