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| Fatimah Tuggar, Voguish Vista, 2012. Computer montage; inkjet on vinyl, 50 x 72 inches. © Fatimah Tuggar, BintaZarah Studios |
In/Visible Seams
February
6 – May 12, 2013
MECHANICAL HALL GALLERY
30
North College Avenue
Newark,
DE
In/Visible Seams brings together a
selection of works by artist Fatimah Tuggar, best known for her large-scale
ink-jet on vinyl prints, assemblages and video collages. Developed through
processes that include photography, image capture, cut and paste,
superimposition, and digital manipulation, Tuggar’s work offers distinct
combinations of wit and irony, compassion and critique. Showcasing the artist’s
beguiling, often unsettled temporal, spatial, and geographic conjunctions, Fatimah Tuggar: In/Visible Seams
includes nineteen computer montages from 1995 to 2012, her renowned video collage,
Fusion Cuisine (2000), and the
assemblage Tum Tum & Tabarma
(1998).
Sourcing
a global range of imagery, including her own photographs, and mining archival
as well as contemporary media, Tuggar’s fusion images and videos are not fictions
per se but rather surreal combines of diverse realities made starker by their juxtaposition.
“Borrowing from the realms of advertising, popular entertainment, folklore, and
the experiential, I use technology as medium, subject and metaphor,” notes the
artist, aiming “to produce artworks that engage how we adapt, modify and are
modified by, the implements and systems that define our environments.”
In
Fusion Cuisine, post-WWII American
commercials promoting new, automated kitchen appliances and in-home designs are
intermixed with contemporary footage from northern Nigeria of women carrying
out various domestic tasks. This video collage of moving images, sound and
animation invites viewers to question whether Western prosperity, industrial
design and invention have in fact advanced women’s emancipation. Perceptual and
visual disjunctures likewise trouble the surface of Cake People, a computer montage from 2001. While viewing ostensibly
a life-size “snap” of a teenager celebrating her sixteenth birthday, we are
drawn into and trapped by the associative values assigned to “tradition,”
“modern,” “Western,” and “African” embedded in Tuggar’s cakes and cake pan.
Collage
and montage strike beyond surface representation; what appears to be visual
incongruity is more acutely the byproduct of social, historical, racial and
gendered constructions. Economies of seeing and visual tropes of place, nation,
gender, and ethnicity all play a role as Tuggar strives to “challenge the
segregated borders of aesthetic and cultural perceptions and to facilitate
diverse ways of knowing and making.”
Tuggar
has long been interested in the potential of modification, the reuse of one
thing for another: in much of her early work, she endeavored to reposition the
image of the black female through a process of re- and de-familiarization,
challenging dogmas and preconceived notions of Africa and black women in both
the private and public spheres. This strategy of deconstructing aspects of the
image to challenge conventional perceptions and attachments to static ways of
looking remains seminal to her work. Her evocation of seemingly irreconcilable
“realities” has been compared with work by early twentieth-century Dada and
Surrealist artists as well as postwar British pop artists—Richard Hamilton of
the Independent Group, in particular; Tuggar herself acknowledges an early
attraction to the often loaded and politically contentious photomontages by the
German artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). In/Visible
Seams draws attention to her use of overlapping visual codes and their
manufactured and fractured meanings as the artist deconstructs their
authoritative place in representational significance.
Created
for the Harlem Postcards project of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Voguish Vista (2012) is a composite
image, incorporating photographs taken by Tuggar in Harlem and other found
imagery. The merging of American Apparel, a global retailer, and Daisy Fashion
Design, a local merchant that “brings African design to NYC,” challenges
interpretations of location and fashion as reliable signifiers. Overlaying the
storefront window, visible as though a reflection, is an image capturing the
Occupy Wall Street movement. Harbingers of the reflected slogan, “the 99% will
not be silenced,” the five female figures in Voguish Vista serve as standard-bearers of fashion and global
interdependency—one wears an “African” print dress patterned with a portrait of
Barack Obama and the American flag.
Visually
alluring and content-rich, Tuggar’s images encourage multiple readings,
offering, in the artist’s words, the “chance to retell history and restructure
hegemonic conditions” as well as to invite conversations about the make-up and
process of image construction. Ultimately, the reorientation of perception,
visual and otherwise, is what Tuggar’s art asks each viewer to undertake.
Born
in 1967 in Kaduna, Nigeria, Fatimah Tuggar attended the Blackheath School of
Art in London, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA
from Yale University. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent
Study Program, and currently on the faculty of the University of Memphis. Among
Tuggar’s honors are the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, 2002; the Andrew W.
Mellon Research Fellowship, awarded by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute,
2008; and grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York, 1999. Her work
has been exhibited widely in over twenty-five countries, most recently in the
USA in The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art
and Society, Rutgers University, 2012; The
Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University,
2010 and On-Screen: Global Intimacy,
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2009.
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| Fatimah Tuggar, Cake People, 2001. Computer montage; inkjet on vinyl, 58 x 48 in. © Fatimah Tuggar, BintaZarah Studios |
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