Exhibition Review: Inward
Quil Lemons, Genesis, 2021. © Quil Lemons
By Zoha Baquar
“The five artists featured in INWARD provide a thought-provoking window into their interior lives,” says the International Centre of Photography’s Curator-at-Large and New Museum’s newly-appointed Deputy Director Isolde Brielmaier. “The revealing new photographs explore intimate thoughts and personal relationships with great honesty, as the artists delve deep into the new reality and challenges of our contemporary lives at a time of global introspection.”
Part of the ICP’s fall exhibition this year, INWARD: Reflections on Interiority, does not necessarily do anything new in thematising ‘interiority’ at large, or even Black interiority in specific. This is a developed idea; notably in Black aesthetics during movements like the Harlem Renaissance, artists understood ‘interior’ settings as those in which true portraits of humanity and identity, collectivity and individuality, are made. These settings are moments of intimacy in the unrefined underbelly of the everyday, of vulnerability in “unseen” inner life, of overlooked pause amidst otherwise hectic survival. INWARD’s newly commissioned works from its five featured emerging Black artists – Djeneba Aduayom, Arielle Bob-Willis, Quil Lemons, Brad Ogbonna and Isaac West – look inward to locate this interiority within the artists’ own lives riddled in today’s era of contingency at the hands of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 U.S. elections.
Djeneba Aduayom, Transplace, 2021. © Djeneba Aduayom
Rather, the newness that this exhibition does bring is credited to one very distinctive choice: to display iPhone camera ‘selfies’. This makes INWARD one of the first exhibitions to recognise the smartphone as a legitimate and formidable artistic tool. Even further, this proves the ability of this technological marvel and the constructed selfie to be subjective, delicate and sensitive – no longer detached, quick and careless. In the history of photography, then, this exhibition gives the smartphone camera and the selfie a seat at the fine arts table;l., most interestingly timed alongside the release of the new iPhone 13 models.
Aduayom turns quietude into a visual spectacle in INWARD. Quietude – a state of stillness, calmness, and contemplation – is maintained throughout the exhibition as a result of her images. “Studies” of textures, light and shapes turn abstract. Portraits of her shadowed self staring afar as well as intently at the camera teem with a confidence in being alone, either an original confidence that carried the artist through socially distanced life, or one that was learnt out of a necessity to cope with it.
Brad Ogbonna, Paul & Peter, 2021. © Brad Ogbonna
Bob-Willis draws from her experience with depression and introspection into beauty, strangeness, isolation, and belonging by dressing the static, moving, and contorted body in resounding colour and uplifting light. In doing so, she empowers otherwise remote and even awkward scenes with fashion, tenderness, warmth, and joy.
“As a Black queer man, there is no space for me, so I constantly carve one,” Lemons remarks. Cinematically costumed as pop royalty in Melanin Monroe and glittered embryonically in Genesis, Lemons lands at self-validation and self-discovery through journeying an interrogation of masculinity, queerness, family, race, beauty and pop culture, within and beyond the skin of the Black male body.
While Aduayom, Bob-Willis and Lemons choose to set their interiors within the presentation of a single figure, Brad Ogbonna and Isaac West set theirs within the interactions between people. Ogbonna presents a series of friends and family portraits in the style of West African portraiture, a typical yet distinct pocket of Nigerian culture, inspired by the likes of Malick Sidibé, Meissa Gaye, and Seydou Keïta. “I didn’t think much about the past until my Dad died,” he says. “Shortly thereafter I inherited his first photo album filled with photos from his youth spent in Nigeria. At the time those images felt like a portal to the not-so-distant past and left me with many more questions than answers. I was enthralled by the mystery of it all.”
Isaac West, Untitled, from IN LOVE, 2021. © Isaac West
West’s reflection on interiority, as presented in his images from his latest series entitled IN LOVE (2021), is that the largest ideas about love and happiness are realised in even the smallest of gestures. In these photographs, which maintain and centre a striking, luminescent Blackness and stylistic colour treatment, West, too, looks to relationships, namely with his girlfriend Naima, to unveil moments of beauty in moments of ordinariness. Grooming, eating, playing – these are the unguarded gentle gestures of comfort and kindness in which humanity reveals itself, unmistakably albeit unassumingly.
While these artists have worked on assignments for major publications such as the New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, this exhibition is most excitingly their museum debut. INWARD: Reflections on Interiority is on view at the ICP at 79 Essex Street, New York, NY, from September 24 – January 20, 2022, alongside exhibitions Gillian Laub: Family Matters and Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara.
Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Jersey 01, 2021. © Arielle Bobb-Willis
