Subliminal Horizons curated by Alvin Hall

Kenji Fujita’s paintings juxtapose simple forms to, in his words, encourage viewers to “[engage] with the work in physical space and time.” Set/Reset #16 (2021) features amorphous shapes against a blue ground. Offset by bright pops of color, Fujita’s composition collapses distinction between micro and macro—its geometry at once suggesting the molecular and a landscape. Updating a modernist vernacular, the animated volumes of Set/Reset #16 inject formalism with a wry playfulness.

Originally from Los Angeles, Henri Paul Broyard’s paintings of interiors reveal his fascination with vintage items. To create his fictional living spaces, the artist combs through second-hand stores, thrift shops, estate sales, and flea markets in search of photographs from the 1960–1980s. Using these as his inspiration, he constructs imaginary spaces that evoke the colorful domestic tableaus of Post-Impressionists like Paul Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. In canvases like GTPS (2019), he coopts this visual language to serve as a framework for experimentation, juxtaposing different approaches to mark-making that are alternately improvisatory and deliberate. 

Carlos Vega is inspired by history, mythology, and religion, which he uses as a point of departure to explore questions around humanity. His works often incorporates historical documents such as antique ledgers, typed cards from library catalogs, postage stamps, newspapers, and labels into paintings on canvas and sometimes lead, which he then punctures, etches, and paints over. Vega's Morebat et Dolebat I (2020) takes its title from the Latin phrase “wept and grieved.” Depicting a grim scene of death and despair, the composition serves as a visual dirge for the suffering experienced by so many during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist whose practice includes silkscreen paintings, photographic collage, video, performance, and publishing. Much of his work is language-based, including the well-known silkscreen series “Black Dada” (2008-). Beyond the references to the color of these monochromatic works (featuring geometric forms and letters from the titular phrase) and the WWI-era Dada movement, the tile of this series, which Pendleton describes as “a hybrid of poster and something else,” references a 1964 work by the Beat poet Amiri Baraka, Black Dada Nihilismus. “Black Dada is a a way to preach about the future while talking about the past. It is our present moment,” he explains.

Kianja Strobert’s mixed-media sculptures and works on paper share a coarseness of texture and an expressive line. Often working in series, Strobert strives to maintain a similar rhythm throughout each work by implementing similar color palettes and visual motifs, as in a recent series that combined sculptures of concrete blocks and terracotta shards with bold abstractions on paper rendered in vibrant autumnal hues. Her delicate and colorful works reveal a preoccupation with assuring that every edge of the composition commands an illusion of depth, perspective, light, and motion. Pushing the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Strobert’s works have no identifiable subject and yet are highly evocative of light and, perhaps, space.

Thundersnow Road is an immersive project in which Xaviera Simmons traveled across North Carolina, from coast to mountains, shooting photographs in both rural and urban environments that reinterpret the cultural and physical landscape. Simmons inserted herself into the settings as anonymous subjects, traveling musicians that appear in the landscape, excavated from the history of the location. In this image, the artist is seen completely immersed in the bare limbs of a forest, holding a guitar and pointing toward something outside of the photograph’s frame. Her fictional characters conjure the lore of the landscape and blur the lines of the imaginative and the real to explore the significance of place, music and storytelling in the South.

Diana Al-Hadid's works probe the perceptions and possibilities of scale, material and medium. Balanced at a vanishingly subtle point of connection between gestural elegance and muscular physicality, Al-Hadid's panel works bring the heft of sculpture into the two-dimensional plane. Al-Hadid makes the panel works via an additive drip process in which she meticulously layers paint with polymer gypsum. As substantial and assured as it is delicate and ornate Styx and Stones reads at first like a two-dimensional work. Seen from a distance in a gallery space, it functions like a painting, even as its careful accumulation of materials hints at its structural complexity. Up close, the work contains spaces of absence: actual gaps between areas of the material where one could reach a finger through and touch the wall. Al-Hadid emphasizes this interplay between presence and absence, surface and depth,  by deploying drips of paint from the top of the work with a determined verticality, so that the viewer experiences Styx and Stones as an oscillation between painting and sculpture.

Huma Bhabha’s work addresses themes of memory, war, displacement, and the pervasive histories of colonialism. Using found materials and the detritus of everyday life, in works like Road to Balkh (2015) she creates haunting sculptures that suggest both monumentality and entropy. While her formal vocabulary is distinctly her own, Bhabha embraces a post-modern hybridity that spans centuries, geography, art-historical traditions, and cultural associations. Her work includes references to ancient Greek Kouroi, Gandharan Buddhas, African sculpture, and Egyptian reliquary. In Road to Balkh, Bhabha pays homage to the ancient city that was on the Silk Road and was sacked by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes in 1222.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Laleh Khorramian approaches her work as a series of experiments with the process of chance as a starting point for discovering possibilities of the unknown. In a vacillating process between macro and micro views of painted landscapes and incidental spaces, Khorramian integrates fiction with spectacle and theater to explore the transience of living matter and beings. Combining spray painted silhouettes and abstract forms with velvet, Lady Totem (2021) recalls the artist’s assertion, “At the moment, … I’m spreading myself a little bit thin, because I’m exploring in a way that I think is necessary, and that feels right. I’ve got to create work and then read that. It tells me where to go.”

While best known for paintings that are all over abstractions collaged from a single paint skin that the artist carves into, Angel Otero’s newest body of work features representational imagery painted directly onto blank canvases and paint skins, foregrounding images drawn from Otero’s memories of his childhood while maintaining the artist’s signature process and abstract style. In works like Untitled (2021), recognizable objects and motifs―beds, house plants, bird cages, couches―seem to float amidst or emerge from the frenetic swirls of layers upon layers of vibrant oil paint. Each painting engages with memories associated with specific objects or spaces, in this case items found in the home. These objects function as subjects, in place of the traditional figure or landscape, and exist as both concrete forms and repositories for memory, their significance constructed through their daily use and the accumulation of associations.

Born in the Bronx area of New York City, Glenn Ligon creates mixed-media works which reference the visual arts, literature and history to explore his experiences as an African American and a gay man living in the United States. In Introduction (5) (2004), the opaque typeface and the black-and-white palette both highlight and obscure the text and image, inviting us to examine the work’s surface and consider the ability—or failure—of words to communicate on issues of race and identity. The painting belongs to a larger, signature body of text-based works on paper and canvas in which he manipulated the same heavy, stenciled typeface. “When I choose a text, it's because I've had a very visceral reaction to it,” the artist explains, “the paintings are an attempt to communicate that to a viewer. It's more group therapy than individual sessions.”

Karlos Cárcamo's Kase Paintings absorb and deploy materials associated with contemporary urban culture to internalize and rework the history of modernism and the formal language of abstraction. Incorporating found materials, notably in the frames, which often bear scorch prints or other marks indicating a complex, multivariate history, Cárcamo's finished works hew to the restrained aesthetics of mid-century modernist works by Lucio Fontana or Robert Ryman. Throughout the Kase Paintings, Cárcamo uses elements of removal, collage, spray paint, and other conceptual or industrial strategies to create objects whose formalist refinement invites a subtler engagement with materials and process. 

A Concrete Movement (For George Floyd), a sculpture made in part from a vinyl record manipulated into an abstract shape, is part of a series begun in 2008 and influenced by a specific series of sculptural work by Brazilian conceptual artist Lygia Clark titled "Bichos". Clark's series dates from the 1960's and consists of hinged metal that could be manipulated by the viewer. The visual form of Clark's work influences Cárcamo's vinyl record pieces. The title A Concrete Movement...alludes to the Concrete Art movement of which Clark was a leading figure while also referencing "movements" around social justice. and in a way I see this as a kind of homage to her work and I make reference to it in the title of the series "A Concrete Movement". 

Jennie C. Jones’s interdisciplinary practice seeks to engage viewers visually and aurally. Drawing on painting, sculpture, sound, and installation, her unconventional materials and reductive compositions highlight the perception of sound within the visual arts. Capturing what Jones has termed "the gesture of sound,” this yet to be titled 2021 diptych plays with the five lines of the staff, turning it vertically and reimagining it as an abstract device whose rises and falls evoke the reverberations of a spectogram. Recalling expanded understandings of music that were advanced by Fluxus artists and composers like John Cage, the piece establishes a connection between drawing and music, transforming wild gesture into booming crescendo. notation), a theme found throughout Jones’ oeuvre the last 10 years.

Martin Puryear is best known for his use of natural materials in creating his sculptures, including tar, rawhide, stone, wire, metals, and, most frequently, wood. He began creating works on paper in the 1960s and returned to the medium at the turn of this century, after a period of devotion to monumental sculpture. The relationship between Puryear’s sculpture and printmaking practice is displayed in works like, Untitled (State 1) (2016), which appears to be a blueprint for the artist’s monumental sculpture, Big Bling (2016) in Philadelphia. However, in this two-dimensional iteration, the shape takes on the appearance of a large, seated cat or an abstracted human form, and the resemblance confirms that whatever the medium, Puryear’s work flows from the same creative stream.

Lyle Ashton Harris’s diverse artistic practice ranges from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work examines the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on contemporary social and cultural dynamics. Nyame Bekyere (2019) belongs to a series of arresting mixed-media assemblages that incorporate traditional African fabric and patterns into their compositions. The work features images “sampled” from the artist’s wall collages, which he creates by combing through his personal archive. As a result, this and other pieces from the series forward an Afro-fusion of historical and contemporary global references that erodes distinctions between the personal and the political.

David Hammons settled in New York in the 1970s and began to work with found objects and installation in the spirit of Dada and Arte Povera as well as California-based assemblage. Hammons gravitated toward objects particularly coded as “black,” from grease to chicken bones and hair, as well as simple, cheap materials like rocks and empty wine bottles. In this Untitled (1985) series, Hammons transforms cultural objects into magical, fetishistic assemblages. Containing recognizable religious and mythical symbols, along with ritualistic ceremonial objects, the ambiguous relationship between chosen materials ultimately confuscate the “message in the bottle.”

Featuring hammer heads, barbed wire, chain, and a horse shoe, Accord (2017) belongs to Melvin Edwards's celebrated series of Lynch Fragments. Titled in honor of the artist's studio in Accord, New York, the disparate objects and materials that inform the structure of Accord invite complimentary and conflicting readings of oppression, industry, creation, and violence. Edwards often incorporates chain and barbed wire into his work because of the multiple uses both materials have. (Chains, for example, while symbolizing human connections, are also tools of bondage and oppression; similarly, barbed wire is frequently used to imprison and separate populations.) Ultimately capitalizing on this disjuncture, Edwards explained to the curator Catherine Craft in 2013, “Using barbed wire, you have to be aware that it was a way to keep the cows at home. But then people turned it into concentration camps. Before it happened with Jewish people in World War II, it happened in Namibia. Those contradictions, or contradistinctions are things that have occupied me in visual art. As a way to realize the dynamic in a situation, art or otherwise, they’re very important to me.”

Jeffrey Gibson’s diverse practice synthesizes the cultural and artistic traditions of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage with the visual languages of modernism and themes from contemporary popular and queer culture. His work is a vibrant call for queer and Indigenous empowerment, envisioning a celebration of strength and joy within these communities. One of Gibson’s tapestry works, POWERFUL BECAUSE THEY'RE DIFFERENT (2019) continues the artist’s project of incorporating craft into contemporary art. The bright colors of the wall work evoke the psychedelic effects of Navajo “eye-dazzler” weavings, which developed in the 1890s with the arrival in various trading posts of brightly colored yarns from mills in industrial towns in the north eastern United States, particularly Germantown, PA. Speaking to narratives of resistance, resilience, and endurance, POWERFUL BECAUSE THEY'RE DIFFERENT coopts the language of geometric abstraction to reflect on, in the curator Marshall N. Price’s words, “both the problematic legacies of … [Gibson’s] own heritage and the problematic legacy of modernism.”

Lisa Corinne Davis’s abstract paintings merge form and content to articulate the complex relationship between race, culture, and history. The “inventive geography” of her compositions, constructed through the juxtaposition of cartographic lines against organic, amorphous forms, challenges reductive understandings of space and identity. Map-like images like Psychotropic Turf (2015) forward a limitless, open-ended approach to navigating a complex world. Championing nuance and eroding prescriptive categorizations of race and gender, Davis’s paintings encourage viewers to question the systems that shape society.

Tschabalala Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The exaggerated biological characteristics of her figures reflect Self’s own experiences and cultural attitudes toward race and gender. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self explains. “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialised body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”