Before we set foot in the gallery, Mark Bradford’s large-scale canvas, Playing Castles (2022), greets us through a window. It reads as a tortured aerial map: deep scratches have pulled through nearly dry paint so forcefully it’s ripped; bare canvas peeks through like an old wound. But end papers – a staple in caring for Black hair – are layered into the painting. Bright yellow paint covers the rough surface like city lights or nodes of a vast neural system, applied with the same devotional care as gold leaf on a religious icon. It hints at the show within; the emergent mysticism in repetitious labour, the way space and time fold through the force of identity, the possibility of transformation within all things. These are the animating themes of ‘The Alchemists’, a group show of 28 artists, all Black, co-curated by Seph Rodney and Donovan Johnson at Johnson Lowe, Atlanta.
Masud Olufani’s Rhythm Section (2022), a suite of three motorized pestles and mortars pounding millet – a millennia-old practice in cultures across the African continent – provides a grinding soundtrack to one wing of the show. Painted in black, green, red and yellow, the colours of pan-African liberation, Olufani suggests that within such repetitive acts lies the kernel of culture, even identity. Around the corner, Masela Nkolo’s Umoja Symposium (2021) consists of a syncretic frieze of pareidolia-inducing objects such as oil lanterns, bicycle frames and steamers. As a child in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, Nkolo began repairing lanterns, a vital household item after the civil war rendered electricity unreliable. Here, with the sound of Olufani’s pestles in the background, they feel like they might again magically come alight, even whir into flight.
Shanequa Gay’s flashe-and-acrylic on wood get that doe… (2015) depicts silhouetted figures – some mid-transmutation into deer, that most innocent of hunted animals – running and leaping wildly from an approaching cop car. Space, here, has been warped into surreal proportions: the road opens up wider than the canvas, entrapping the viewer; the natural whorl of the wood, toned like white flesh, evokes a portal threatening to swallow up the fleeing men. The foremost figure, knee bent, rests his toes along the bottom edge of the canvas, as if poised to leap out of the frame: indeed, the wall, painted with whirling elongated deer-men alongside large-petaled flowers, suggests freedom, but also limbo or mourning.
Follow a clockwise circuit of the show and you’ll end with Danielle Deadwyler’s Kitchen Installation #2, in which a lingerie-clad Black woman cleans an oven to French Montana ft. Drake, Lil Wayne and Rick Ross’s ‘Pop That’ – ‘Drop that pussy bitch / What ya twerkin' wit'?’ – only her bottom half visible. After the international tour of violence and mysticism, the piece could feel banal: we’ve been returned to a flat domestic reality of the subjugation of women by men. The music, however, is endogenous – we’re not in fact watching a most female method of self-obliteration to a deprecating soundtrack. Rather, she’s listening to it, cleaning her house, feeling herself – self-care ritual turned ritualized identity affirmation.
Or you might end, instead, at the feet of Ebony G. Patterson’s below... (2021), which similarly transforms banal substrate into a work that emanates power. A multi-armed figure rendered with patchwork floral quilting is almost completely obscured by swaths of monarch butterflies, encrusted flowers and deluges of plastic beads. ‘This looks exactly like a doll I used to have,’ a fellow visitor marvelled to me, pointing to a ragged pink polka-dotted ribbon camouflaged in the phantasmagoria. Each time the doll had fallen apart, she told me, her mother had stitched it back together. To see it again, in this form, a headpiece to this deity – what magic.
‘The Alchemists’ is on view at Johnson Lowe, Atlanta, until 29 April.
