Art is the evidence of the universe’s alchemy.
[No. 23]
HOW DO WE TALK ABOUT THAT WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS?
“All that is left is that reflection.”
Bisa Butler
Bisa Butler: The World Is Yours Show [Image courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch Gallery]
I step into the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York as neon tapestries make my eyes widen. Bisa Butler’s show This World is Yours quite literally weaves stories of our checkered, together past into textiles and textures that dialogue with the artist’s personal present. In the tradition of Faith Ringgold, she creates a wrinkle in space-time. What “no longer exists” dances unselfconsciously with the contemporary in front of our eyes in stitches and strokes; a resilient mother and child in taffeta dresses at the height of Jim Crow segregation stand hand-in-hand on the same wall as Questlove and Salt-N-Pepa. I feel a momentum binding maker to seer with a quiet, invisible thread. I feel her materiality, and I feel my own.
“…I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Joan Didion
One week later, I am back out west. Benson escorts me to the Night Gallery, where Danielle McKinney’s paintings of Black femmes in repose take my breath away. They nod to Eurocentric paintings and make me think about rest in general. About mothers, about wives. I wonder who Benson sees in the work. I wonder about our blossoming friendship.
Again, a soft sweet binding unselfconsciously slithers from sensory experience to artist to viewer which then in their viewing create their own sensory experience. The circle, round and round. A digested past nourishes the present. Together we take a collective breath.
[UNDEFINED SPACES BETWEEN ARE SO VERY INTIMATE!]
Last week, we spoke of ancestors.
Today, we speak of them still. To speak about that which no longer exists as having evaporated completely from our cup leaves us deprived of the very nectar every experience pours into us! Rather, when properly honored, what was can become something greater than its initial reference point.
[IN OTHER WORDS, YOU ARE THE BRIDGE.]
In the end, everything comes and goes. Art is a living breathing example for me of how to be with something that has already happened. In a state of both reference and reverence. However rocky or messy, I believe we have a responsibility to be our own art historians. It is important to turn toward that which stings, enlivens, alters. When we look at the history head-on, we alchemize pain into beauty. The past decorates the body, psyche, soul, and a new chapter begins.
Then, one day we awake, and our memories hang above like mobiles, and we shine.
Bright.
Like stars.
And together we make constellations, and we paint the sky.