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Lot Essay
"It took more than four billion years to transform lifeless rocks and water into an astonishingly diverse paradise, and less than a century to destroy thousands of the species that make it prosper. It is difficult to care about species that have been lost if you never knew of their existence." -Sylvia Earle
Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage belongs to a group of works recording the artist’s attempt to reconcile his black experience with visions of future paradise. Here, a kaleidoscopic pattern of shapes and color settles into symmetry against a background of vinyl photographic cut-outs. Highly-saturated palms taunt with promises of tropical escapes from mundanity, yet assert their contrived nature through unnatural hues and psychedelic shadows. Accompanying such greenery are zigzagging bands of starry sky marked with youthful fervor, as if the artist hoped to implant himself vicariously in the cosmos by way of his oil stick. Dreams of beyond, however, are interrupted by two ceramic tile triangles, which interpose their domesticity between the real and the celestial. Still, these homey interludes abide by the geodesic construction that governs most of the composition.
Slicing through the geometric regularity is the defining chrysalis shape, an allusion to transformative rebirth. Portals to another world, these organic forms part like curtains to reveal shattered mirrors, mosaic fractals, and Johnson’s singular version of branded red oak. Most poignant are the pistachio-shaped eyes wrested from images of wooden African deities, ready to pop open at a moment’s notice to catch the viewer in his or her intrusive gaze. These concessions to the past are dominated by the artist’s brash assertion of today. Johnson dispels the work’s lofty claims by taking it to the street—literally tagging his own work with graffiti marks, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural tendencies. As utopia materializes, the hooded teenager appears with a bottle of spray paint to reintroduce raw humanity. For he knows how quickly utopia can become dystopia when devoid of human presence. Thus, Johnson rescues the viewer from debilitating fantasies of a nonexistent world through vestiges of his youth spent tagging Chicago cement.
Despite a penchant for street art, Johnson matured with a mother in academia, a craftsman father, and a Nigerian stepfather. His childhood among books, ideas, and multiculturalism informs the brilliance behind this composition. Before one’s eyes, the cacophony of forms gives way to carefully planned symmetry. Intersections of triangles form new triangles, while overlapping diamonds look like an argyle sweater on school picture day. Even the apparent vandal marks exist in pairs—no gesture is made without its equal and opposite. Such deep thought is characteristic of Johnson’s recent work, much of which represents a culmination of past experimentation in various mediums. His spring show at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles featured several Untitled Escape Collages, each its own size and compilation of colors. To witness just one of these is to be privy to Johnson’s self-discovery, achieved via visceral exploration of culture and heritage.
To reaffirm such heritage in his position as a black artist, Johnson superimposes an element of the uncontrolled over rigid digital imagery: “I’ve always considered the artist as almost a magician-like character who grants agency to materials to allow them to be elevated into objects that we admire…I really wanted to create a body of work that spoke to the agency of the black character” (R. Johnson, quoted by D. Weiskopf, “At Home in Abstraction: Interview with Rashid Johnson,” BURNAWAY, June 2013, via www.burnaway.org [accessed 8/22/18]) . Not only is he interested in understanding his role, but also the role of materials, specifically those with personal significance: “Black soap is this kind of healing material that you can find in West Africa, but you also find it on the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chicago. It becomes this signifier, a symbol for cleansing material. It’s for people with sensitive skin, so I’m talking about a sensitive issue, about sensitive people…” (R. Johonson, quoted by A. Touré, “Artist Rashid Johnson Loves Being Black,” L’Officiel, February 2018, via www.lofficiel.com [accessed 8/22/18]). Blending sticky soap and wax harkens back to the encaustic technique, used from the Byzantine Empire through Jasper Johns’s oeuvre to achieve precise detail in hurried brushstrokes. Thus, Johnson’s collages become an exquisite merging of the study and the street, future dreams and present realities.
Often cited in relation to artists like Sam Gilliam and Kara Walker, Rashid Johnson interrogates his black identity with uniquely fierce ambiguity. Johnson’s resort to abstraction functions as a lens through which he is both able to comment on and come to terms with his black experience in the “post-black” world. A term introduced by curator Thelma Golden as part of Freestyle, her 2001 exhibition of young black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Johnson’s break-out show, post-black refers to the necessary fluidity of black identity in the period following the late-20th century culture wars, and the pursuant freedom of artists to ask questions with their work. Johnson’s most recent works are especially relevant today, as he reintroduces aesthetic concern into prevalent national tensions. In this way, Johnson enacts his most pressing role—that of question-asker, rather than answerer. Unresolved within itself, Untitled Escape Collage opens dialogue channels by which the investigation of culture will inevitably continue among those who choose to enter.
Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage belongs to a group of works recording the artist’s attempt to reconcile his black experience with visions of future paradise. Here, a kaleidoscopic pattern of shapes and color settles into symmetry against a background of vinyl photographic cut-outs. Highly-saturated palms taunt with promises of tropical escapes from mundanity, yet assert their contrived nature through unnatural hues and psychedelic shadows. Accompanying such greenery are zigzagging bands of starry sky marked with youthful fervor, as if the artist hoped to implant himself vicariously in the cosmos by way of his oil stick. Dreams of beyond, however, are interrupted by two ceramic tile triangles, which interpose their domesticity between the real and the celestial. Still, these homey interludes abide by the geodesic construction that governs most of the composition.
Slicing through the geometric regularity is the defining chrysalis shape, an allusion to transformative rebirth. Portals to another world, these organic forms part like curtains to reveal shattered mirrors, mosaic fractals, and Johnson’s singular version of branded red oak. Most poignant are the pistachio-shaped eyes wrested from images of wooden African deities, ready to pop open at a moment’s notice to catch the viewer in his or her intrusive gaze. These concessions to the past are dominated by the artist’s brash assertion of today. Johnson dispels the work’s lofty claims by taking it to the street—literally tagging his own work with graffiti marks, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural tendencies. As utopia materializes, the hooded teenager appears with a bottle of spray paint to reintroduce raw humanity. For he knows how quickly utopia can become dystopia when devoid of human presence. Thus, Johnson rescues the viewer from debilitating fantasies of a nonexistent world through vestiges of his youth spent tagging Chicago cement.
Despite a penchant for street art, Johnson matured with a mother in academia, a craftsman father, and a Nigerian stepfather. His childhood among books, ideas, and multiculturalism informs the brilliance behind this composition. Before one’s eyes, the cacophony of forms gives way to carefully planned symmetry. Intersections of triangles form new triangles, while overlapping diamonds look like an argyle sweater on school picture day. Even the apparent vandal marks exist in pairs—no gesture is made without its equal and opposite. Such deep thought is characteristic of Johnson’s recent work, much of which represents a culmination of past experimentation in various mediums. His spring show at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles featured several Untitled Escape Collages, each its own size and compilation of colors. To witness just one of these is to be privy to Johnson’s self-discovery, achieved via visceral exploration of culture and heritage.
To reaffirm such heritage in his position as a black artist, Johnson superimposes an element of the uncontrolled over rigid digital imagery: “I’ve always considered the artist as almost a magician-like character who grants agency to materials to allow them to be elevated into objects that we admire…I really wanted to create a body of work that spoke to the agency of the black character” (R. Johnson, quoted by D. Weiskopf, “At Home in Abstraction: Interview with Rashid Johnson,” BURNAWAY, June 2013, via www.burnaway.org [accessed 8/22/18]) . Not only is he interested in understanding his role, but also the role of materials, specifically those with personal significance: “Black soap is this kind of healing material that you can find in West Africa, but you also find it on the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Chicago. It becomes this signifier, a symbol for cleansing material. It’s for people with sensitive skin, so I’m talking about a sensitive issue, about sensitive people…” (R. Johonson, quoted by A. Touré, “Artist Rashid Johnson Loves Being Black,” L’Officiel, February 2018, via www.lofficiel.com [accessed 8/22/18]). Blending sticky soap and wax harkens back to the encaustic technique, used from the Byzantine Empire through Jasper Johns’s oeuvre to achieve precise detail in hurried brushstrokes. Thus, Johnson’s collages become an exquisite merging of the study and the street, future dreams and present realities.
Often cited in relation to artists like Sam Gilliam and Kara Walker, Rashid Johnson interrogates his black identity with uniquely fierce ambiguity. Johnson’s resort to abstraction functions as a lens through which he is both able to comment on and come to terms with his black experience in the “post-black” world. A term introduced by curator Thelma Golden as part of Freestyle, her 2001 exhibition of young black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Johnson’s break-out show, post-black refers to the necessary fluidity of black identity in the period following the late-20th century culture wars, and the pursuant freedom of artists to ask questions with their work. Johnson’s most recent works are especially relevant today, as he reintroduces aesthetic concern into prevalent national tensions. In this way, Johnson enacts his most pressing role—that of question-asker, rather than answerer. Unresolved within itself, Untitled Escape Collage opens dialogue channels by which the investigation of culture will inevitably continue among those who choose to enter.