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| Ayana V Jackson, Does the Brown Paper Bag Test Really Exist? / Will my Father be Proud?, 2013, Archival Pigment Print. 54 x 42.7 inches. Image via njcu.edu. |
Archival
Impulse
January 22 - February 27
New Jersey University Visual Arts Building
100 Culver
Avenue
Jersey
City, NJ
From
njcu.edu:
In her
latest series of performance-based photographs, Ayana V Jackson confronts the
stereotype and projected desire found in the late 19th and early 20th century
imagery of African female subjects. By drawing on images sourced from the
Duggan Cronin collection in South Africa, Jackson interrogates the works of
unknown photographers practicing throughout the global south at the time, as
well as documentation of reconstructed villages and “native” performers that
were touring in Europe’s Human Zoos.
Archival Impulse takes its name from art
historian Hal Foster’s idea that by confronting the archive new systems of
knowledge can be created. The artist’s process involves identifying reoccurring
motifs in the original images, interrogating them, performing them and
reconstructing them. Her primary intervention is in her deliberate choice not
to situate the “subjects” in the scenario. The separation of the bodies in the
foreground from the background image is done first to bring attention to the
fact that these early photographs are theatrical performances written and
directed by the photographer and subject alike and as such are fictitious,
second to ask questions around the photograph’s potential as an agent of
propaganda, and last, if not most importantly, to transform this theatre into a
space where new narratives might emerge.
In an
essay about Jackson’s work, theorist and political scientist Achille Mbembe,
Ph.D., a political scientist, states: “Exploring archival material is a way of
walking through time’s thickets in the footprints of the past. And this is
where Ayana V Jackson has chosen to begin her audacious journey…Positing
herself as the Other, she re-walks the paths of those who have preceded her,
and adds her image to theirs. The artist exhibits her stylized body with
immodest reserve; its fine contours radiate beauty and grace. There is no need
for metaphor, even when semi-nude or staged with sensuality.”
These
pictures of a body – a Black body – provoke a logjam of feelings. The viewer is
inclined to feel seduced while faced with fundamental ambiguity. Is the person
portrayed identical in all respects? She can be viewed in detail but is she
truly seen? What does this glistening, black skin of this libidinous body
signify? When does this body, simultaneously displayed for all eyes to see and
embodying others, stop being a subject and become an object? And how is this
object the expression of forbidden pleasure?”
Based
between Johannesburg, New York, and Paris, Jackson is currently a NYFA Fellow
for Photography. Jackson has exhibited her work in association with Gallery
MOMO (Johannesburg, RSA), Galerie Baudoin Lebon, (Paris, FR), Galerie Sho
Contemporary (Tokyo, Japan), the San Francisco Mexican Museum (USA), Museum of
Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA), USA, and the Philadelphia African
American Museum (USA). She has also participated in the 2014 Casablanca
Biennale and the Bamako Encounters, African Photography Biennale.
For more images from the exhibition, click here.
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