City Gallery Creates A Disruption

Ransome’s Coming Out manages to be comforting and confounding at the same time. The artist’s use and rendition of a quilt makes it feel like safety.

But the men under the quilt don’t feel safe.

“It’s a painting about two gay slaves who were lovers,” said curator Howard el-Yasin, ​“which in itself speaks to rupture. One is looking at the arrows and the street, the other at the gallery. One is calling, and one is silent.”

Ransome’s painting tells a more complicated story of slavery and Blackness than one we might usually see in public, and it’s part of ​“Legacy and Rupture,” the show running at City Galley on Upper State St. through May 30. Curated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Howard el-Yasin, in addition to Ransome, it features artists Nathaniel Donnett, Sika Foyer, Merik Goma, James Montford, Kamar Thomas, and Marisa Williamson.

As the official notes to the exhibit have it, ​“Legacy & Rupture brings together these seven wonderful contemporary Black artists whose work expresses the multiplicity of our identities framed by the everydayness of precarity, trauma, and memories. Critical Black consciousness thinker Christina Sharpe reminds us that ​‘the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.’ If rupture, as such, is also understood to mean resistance, Black aesthetic practitioners have the capacity to resist the historical materiality (race, class, gender, and sexuality) and the subjectivity of Blackness. The artwork in this show explores differences in representation rather than the reproduction of Blackness.” 

For el-Yasin, the artists’ explorations of Black identity, and the ideas about legacy and rupture that motivate the exhibit, are about ​“how each artists is thinking about time and space,” he said. ​“Their work appealed to me for different reasons,” and each artist ​“is approaching the concept of Blackness in a different way.” But he didn’t specifically ask the artists to respond to one another; ​“I wanted it to be rhizomatic,” he said, in the sense that he wanted to give the artists the space to express themselves as individuals, which they did. But ​“they all speak to the continuity, the lineage, and the legacy” of Black artists. But they also consider ideas about disrupting the status quo. ​“I’m thinking of resistance as a form of rupture,” el-Yasin said. The connections grow from there; ​“there’s a conversation generated because they’re all in the same space.”

As a curator, ​“I use installation spaces to explore an idea,” el-Yasin said. ​“I’m paying attention to all the details I see, the connections I see.” The way el-Yasin has chosen to use the space in City Gallery encourages viewers to find those connections for themselves. Rather than creating discrete spaces for each artist’s pieces, el-Yasin has installed the pieces so that each artist’s work flows into the next. It makes a visit to the gallery immersive, with a sense that all is in motion — which itself serves the ideas el-Yasin sees as being at play.

Ari Montfort’s arrows, for example, could have all been clustered in one spot, but instead el-Yasin installed them in small clusters at various places throughout the gallery space, almost as if someone had actually come in with a bow and just started shooting. The sense of assault is vital. ​“What he’s doing with the arrows is piercing the space — the White cube, really,” el-Yasin. It’s all the more meaningful, then, that Montfort’s arrows partake of both African and Native America visual designs. ​“There were certainly connections between Africans who were enslaved and indigenous people.” It’s also certain that they suffered under the same oppressor.

Nathaniel Donnett’s series of pieces, meanwhile, concerns itself with survival. A book addressing the subject of post-Blackness — a set of ideas a couple decades old that seems now quite complicated in our current historical and political moment — hangs amid everyday objects, while a spoken-word piece by Donnett, set to music, plays from a video. Donnett, said el-Yasin, is ​“Interested in the rhythm … the upside-downness.” For el-Yasin, Donnett’s piece ​“incorporates everydayness into his work because everydayness is work.” In the gallery space, the soundtrack for Donnett’s artwork becomes the audio accompaniment for all the artists’ work.

Sika Foyer’s piece Trickster, meanwhile, occupies the center of the gallery as both a focal point and a transition; its amorphous shape embodies the flow and change across the show, while in its techniques and motifs it reaches back in time. ​“She’s using a traditional trope, a literary trope,” of a character who appears in African and other folklore all over the world. ​“The figure represents someone who has this magical power to be someone other than who they are.” And similar to Montfort’s work with arrows, Foyer is using the materials to move out of a Western and into a non-Western perspective on making art. It goes back to the roots to create change now.

Merik Goma’s image is arresting enough as it is; dark and moody, it evokes images of grief and mourning and, simultaneously, an investigation of a crime scene; someone has been lost, some wrong has been done. It’s a story waiting to be explored.

The decision to re-stage the set that Goma created to take his picture adds another layer of depth. It puts us in the shoes of the subject of the photo, or perhaps it makes us the object of the man’s troubled mind. Or, perhaps, it makes us complicit in the wrong that has been done. The ​“dystopic” set is ​“the sort of thing that’s exciting to see in a gallery,” el-Yasin said — a peek behind the curtain, the ​“construction of an illusion,” and a confrontational look inward.

In a series of images and postcards, Williamson uses a kind of parody of nostalgia to examine ​“the traces that are left behind. What determines a monument? And a monument doesn’t necessarily serve everyone,” el-Yasin said. Williamson’s piece feels on one level like a travelogue of a family vacation in childhood, but one that inveighs against draping memories of the past in gauzy good feelings. Instead, she uses the format to ask provocative questions. ​“What narratives have been created around the land which you occupy?” her pieces ask. ​“In whose footsteps do you move?” An accordion cut of postcards of the same images is displayed just underneath the posters, where more context is given — but the questions only continue.

And Kamar Thomas’s piece can read as celebration and disguise, strength and caution. It’s a burst of fragile light that in its palette connects to the stripes of fabric in Foyer’s woven figures, the colors of Williamson’s posters, and the wrapped decorations on Montfort’s arrows. ​“What does the gaze look like? What does it feel like when it is returned?” el-Yasin asked of Thomas’s piece. The show, as a whole, reveals the edge those questions have.

“Legacy and Rupture” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through May 30. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.