Exhibition Review: Set it Off exhibition at Parrish Art Museum
© Kennedy Yanko, Wading the Storm, 2022. Crushed aluminum and paint skin. 108 x 204 x72. Installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Written by Lia Jung
Copy Edited by Erin Pedigo
Photo Edited by Yanting Chen
Under the corrugated metal roof of the barn-inspired studio in Water Mill, New York, a temperate stillness fills the room. Through the translucent panes, the East End sunlight casts a halo on Wading the Storm (2022), the newly installed sculpture by Kennedy Yanko. Part crushed aluminium and part paint skin, Yanko’s piece is an impressive specimen; an industrial lifeform whose body pulsates like dark matter, with unexpected sensuousness. Suspended off the ground, the sculpture draws attention to its own dissonance of being both weighty and weightless: a work of alchemy, giving rise to a new lifeform that pushes the boundaries of human bone and flesh. The lumpy metal enveloped by undulating layers of paint speaks of a coexistence, but one that isn’t easy—there is struggle here, and this struggle seems to be Yanko’s way of narrating the crisis one experiences in a bodily existence.
© Karyn Olivier, 363 Days (soon come), 2021. Inkjet pigment print on clear film mounted on acrylic, asphalt/tar roofing. 33 ½ x 23 5/8 x 1. Installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
© Karyn Olivier, How Many Ways Can You Disappear, 2021. Salt casted rope, resin, buoys. 179 x 98 x 73. Installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
In the same room, Karyn Olivier’s work also incorporates multiple substances to assert tension between materials. Asphalt, or roofing tar, engulfs the photographs exposing clusters of urban life: stacks of bricks, discarded clothes, corners of buildings, walkways are all affixed to the wall. The layer of asphalt, poured over the images like spilled coffee, suggest these vignettes have been captured by accident (the same way footprints on wet cement are accidental), a curious contradiction knowing that everything about the composition was designed with intention. Such juxtapositions laden in Olivier’s representation of these tarred photographs create a poignant commentary reflecting on the practical functions of materials that shape our everyday life.
© Torkwase Dyson, Acrylic on canvas paintings, installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
© Torkwase Dyson, Liquidity, Expanse, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 80 x 96 x 2. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery
A different conversation takes place in another gallery where the works of Torkwase Dyson and Kameelah Janan Rasheed face one another in a mutual standoff: Dyson’s acrylic paintings use formal geometrics and monochrome as a subtle point of investigation on the restrictive space of a built environment. In both The Horizon 01 (2017) and The Horizon 02 (2017), the paintings’ overlapping rectangles crowd the canvas the same way buildings congest cities. At the same time, the multiple polygons that are the same shape as the canvas invite the viewer to think about the act of iteration, and all the possible ways in which a surface can be aware of its margins.
© Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Primitive Hypertext II, 2022. Xerox, acrylic paint, pen, acetate, and single channel video. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and NOME Gallery, Berlin. Installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
Repetition is also a key theme in Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s installation, where a different layering of meaning operates. If Dyson’s consideration of the spatial was about breaking down the barrier between exterior and interior, then Rasheed’s challenge for us is to conceive of space as a diacritic mark. Across the wall, projected images and silent video are in numbered progression, the phrase “I am not done yet” written multiple times. The lines and footnotes connecting the same phrase to different clauses do not necessarily make sense (i.e., I am not done yet…I pray), articulating an attempt at communication that is unsuccessful. The video of a woman’s mouth is in a loop, but the sound is muted; no matter how many times it gets played, the words that come off her lips won’t be audible or ever reach the viewer standing before it.
Intricately woven narratives, produced as a result of pairing up these different artists—Yanko with Olivier; Dyson with Rasheed—are the insightful creation of two Brooklyn- based curators, Racquel Chevremont and Mickalene Thomas (collectively known as Deux Femmes Noires). Interested in the way aesthetic tradition and modern materials can suggest different forms of technical mediation, particularly space and the experience of occupying such space(s), the two worked to bring together an assemblage of fifty works by six female artists, all women of color, who reflect on such topics.
The title of the curation, Set it Off, is a provocation to make noise, rupture, bring in the storm—an invitation extended by Deux Femmes Noires to their fellow female artists to do something new and exciting with an institution that is still predominately white and male. “Each (artist) was chosen for ... forging their own path and creating work that transcends traditional formal and art historical structures,” the two explained in a press release. Set it Off is also a mission statement, to literally “set off” and launch the careers of these female artists of color: “Every artist in this show has major projects that are about to drop, simultaneously, when this show is up,” Thomas emphasized.
© February James, These Are My Ghosts To Sit With, 2022. Installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
Around the corner, a series of February James’s ghostly portraits conflate the dead with the living, underlining the questionable status of visibility for Black identity. Next to it you see a wall with more of these haunting faces; drawn on tiny canvases, the series is titled And Then The Spirits Came To Me With The Burden Of Truth. James’s work is how one might picture W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” as a visual representation: in “Invisible Man,” Du Bois describes the living condition of Black people as “[being] shut behind a veil, viewing from within and without.”
Even in the livelier paintings where vibrant colors are used, the figures still carry a sense of melancholy: through their vacuous eyes, James explores the intersection of public and private personas, whose individual lives are tied to their ancestors and the history of Black identity. At the center of the room, the array of antique furniture titled These Are My Ghosts To Sit With further echoes this notion, where an unoccupied table sits in front of an old yellow panelled armoire, with a haloed woman painted on its surface.
© Leilah Babirye, installation view as part of Set It Off at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
Past legacies reverberate in the collected works of Leilah Babirye, who repurposes debris taken from the streets of New York with ceramics, metal, and wood, transforming objects into figurative pieces of dialogue that responds to the recent passing of the anti- homosexuality bill in Uganda. In Tuli Mukwano (We Are in Love), (2018), two figures carved out of wood are caught in a lovers’ embrace, wearing traditional African headdresses made of soft drink package wrappers—Sprite, Pepsi, Schweppes—and can tops. The use of discarded waste for the headdresses directly refers to the language used for a gay person in the Luganda language: “ebisiyaga,” meaning sugarcane husk, the portion of the plant that gets cut off and thrown away.
The multifaceted journey of Set it Off with its many installations and artists, is why Deux Femmes Noires picked the Parrish Art Museum as their gallery. Designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building is the perfect venue for immersive modern art that thinks about its own relations of space. As one walks through the galleries, they will find themselves immersed in the exhibit’s story: a rejoinder between art with architecture that experiments on alternative monuments and the existing realities that are embedded in such settings.
© Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, in front of Kennedy Yanko’s
Landscape I, 2022. Set It Off, Parrish Art Museum. Photo: Jon Jenkins
