NEW YORK, NY.- Jenkins Johnson Projects,
New York is presenting Figural Realism, an exhibition curated by Meleko Mokgosi, featuring works by M'barek Bouhchichi, Armando Cortés, Sophie Harpo, Sophie Kovel, Orlee Malka, and Emily Velez Nelms to begin November 5th with an opening reception at 5:00 and a Curatorial Tour, Artist Talk, and Performance by Left Handed Sophie (Sophie Harpo) at 6:00pm.
“History, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation. In this light the history of no epoch ever has the practical self-sufficiency which, from the standpoint both of primitive man and of modern science, resides in the accomplished fact; all history, rather remains open and questionable, points to something still concealed, and the tentativeness of events in the figural interpretation is fundamentally different from the tentativeness of events in the modern view of historical development.”
- Erich Aurbach
Figural Realism takes its title from historian Hayden V. White’s book Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1998). In his book, White writes on scholar Erich Aurbach’s seminal work on mimesis and argues that history is always an incomplete and unstable project that depends on discursivity. White exposes the literariness of historical writing and the realism of literary writing, in order to further argue that what is conventionally understood as a history should always be contested. He puts forth that the “very distinction between literal and figurative speech is a purely conventionalist distinction and is to be understood by its relevance to the sociopolitical context in which it arises.”
According to White, the central question has to do with discursivity – that any form of language and its boundaries as well as its authority should be up for debate and continuously questioned, therefore not taken as universal. By focusing on discourse, White defends the attachment to theory as a necessary element to intellectual enterprise. Normatively, theory is often cast against the personal experience — people’s lifeworlds and the phenomenological which desire to do justice to the “particularities of existence.” In his methodology, White asserts that theory is always already a part of any proposition; therefore theory, at its core, “seeks to problematize the very relation between what can be seen and what can be thought about what one has perceived from the vantage point of the perception.”
White’s arguments for the contestation of history together with his methodology serve as points of departure for the exhibition Figural Realism. The exhibition’s aim is not to illustrate or prove any one approach, but rather to highlight how artists continuously experiment with various conceptual frameworks, methods of analysis, and forms of object-making in order to challenge conventional systems of display, economic exchange, knowledge production, representational spaces, and historiography. In doing so, the main premise is not only towards different forms of speculation but also an investigation into the very notions of experimentation and the opening up of the imagination — that is, bringing into focus “the vision of what might be.”
M’barek Bouhchichi is an artist living and working in Tahanaout, Morocco. He has taught art since the mid 1990s, first in Tiznit and today in Tahanaout. Bouhchichi develops his work through a tentative language grounded on the exploration of the limits between our internal discourse and its extension towards the outer world. He places his works at the crossroad between the aesthetic and the social, exploring associated fields as possibilities for selfdefinition. Through installations, paintings, drawings and videos, Bouhchichi gives shape to modes of expression that move between individual discourses and those pertaining to broader social, poetic and historic contexts. The main threads of his works reflect an individualized voice that enables a re-writing of the self. It is a thought process that unfolds between the idea and the experience of his works. His recent work on the Amazigh Poet and musician
M’barek Ben Zida is in line with these questions. Through different free systems of correspondences, Bouhchichi maintains a dialogue that is both intimate and distant with Ben Zida, between form and language, poetry and history. Music, poetry and art act like catalysts that make it possible to go beyond social and racial determinisms. M’barek Bouhchichi has participated in exhibitions, biennials and conferences in Morocco and abroad. His recent exhibitions include: Dak’art, 13th edition of the Biennial of Contemporary African Art (Dakar, 2018); Documents bilingues (MUCEM, Marseille, 2017); Between Walls (Le 18, Marrakech, 2017); Les mains noires (Kulte, Rabat, 2016); Global(e) Resistance (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2020).
Armando Guadalupe Cortés is an artist living and working in the industrial city of Wilmington, California. Originally from Urequío, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from every aspect of his two vastly different worlds. Growing up in two worlds, sharply contrasted yet running parallel, leads Cortés to a fantastical take on the quotidian. Within the everyday of the rural and the industrial lie subtleties that inform his work, that build stories, propagate myth, and create room for histories, magical and otherwise. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Cortés seeks to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction. Cortés earned his undergraduate degree at UCLA in 2012 and his Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2021. He has recently exhibited at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles; ASU Art Museum, Arizona; Space One, Seoul; White Cube, London; and MASS MoCA.
Sophie Harpo’s enchanting performances and immersive works on paper explore the intersections of race, gender, magick, and mythology. By drawing inspiration from pop art, cartoons, and drag, their practice defies categorization and pushes viewers to reconsider the boundaries of fine art, commercial visual culture, and everyday life. Harpo has been in exhibitions at, The Columbus Museum of Art, Mahan Gallery, Krannert Art Museum, and the Eik Center Art Gallery at Yale. The artist attended Columbus College of Art and Design.
Sophie Kovel is an artist and writer. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; VERY Project Space, Berlin; The Jewish Museum, New York; University of Los Angeles, California; and Petrine, Paris. Kovel has spoken on panels and symposiums at institutions including Columbia University and the Brooklyn Public Library, and her interviews and criticism have been published in Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Spike, and Bomb Magazine. She received her MFA
in New Genres from Columbia University in 2022, where she received the Agnes Martin and Andrew Fisher Fellowships, and is a 2022-23 studio participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Orlee Malka is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York. Her conceptual and collaborative work considers the possibilities of art making within forms of collapse. In fieldwork to the unconsoled (2018) Malka examines issues of excavation practices and museum restitution. This ongoing project consists of objects, replicas, readings and experiments that are informed by practices of remembering and witnessing. Malka received her MFA from Columbia University in 2018, and was among the inaugural fellows of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York.
Emily Velez Nelms was born and raised in southern Florida, she is Mexican, Native American (Apache and Cherokee), and Filipino. She studied painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA 2013) and sculpture at the University of California Los Angeles (MFA 2019) and is currently an MED candidate ‘24 at Yale University. Her work takes various forms from compact objects to public art, video, writing, and installation. Velez Nelms’ work engages with nostalgia, the collective ancestral body, and Indigenous Methodology. Velez Nelms’ studio practice extends to the archive, revisiting non-ceremonial objects of Native American communities of the Southeast and Southwest, doing her best to source knowledge on those objects, such as the artist and acquisition journey. She is currently investigating an accession of 200 plus objects collected during fieldwork to the Seminole Tribe of Florida in 1952, by anthropologists from the Yale Peabody Museum.
Meleko Mokgosi is an artist and Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art. His large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history. His most recent body of work, Democratic Intuition (2013 - 2020) poses questions about ideas of the democratic in relation to the daily-lived experiences of the subjects that occupy southern Africa. Touching on the often-contradictory notions inherent in the concept and practice of democracy — the individual in the face of the collective, intuitive versus inscribed behaviors — Mokgosi probes the idiosyncratic ways in which democracy is reciprocated and unfolds across time.
Mokgosi received his BA from Williams College in 2007 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program that same year. He then received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. He participated in the Rauschenberg Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL in 2015 and the Artist in Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY in 2012. In 2018 he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City.
His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, recently with solo exhibitions at The Pérez Art Museum Miami, Williams College Museum of Art, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, and the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; California African American Museum; Raleigh Contemporary Art Museum; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden and the 12th Biennale de Lyon; other venues include the Botswana National Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, Peekskill, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Los Angeles, CA; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work is included in public collections such as The Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art for Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
“Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?”— Gan, “Bloodchild”, Octavia E. Butler
Jenkins Johnson Gallery,
San Francisco is presenting Bloodchild, featuring work by Nyame Brown, Xandra Ibarra, Shara Mays, Gregory Rick, Stuart Robertson, and Leila Weefur starting November 5th. Taking its title from Octavia E. Butler’s story titled “Bloodchild,” first published in 1984, this exhibition invites the viewer to investigate the power of speculative fiction to imagine alternative world-buildings and narrative-making strategies. There will be an opening reception at 3:00 and an Artist Walk-Through to start at 3:30.
Perceived as the mother of Afrofuturism, the genre blending science fiction, fantasy, and history to speculate on liberated future scenarios through a Black lens, Butler wrote cautionary tales. In her stories and novels, she projects into the future to investigate possible solutions. Using Butler’s “Bloodchild” story as a lens to look at the art-making today, the exhibition meditates on symbiosis, love, power, and tough choices. Set on a foreign planet inhabited by insect-like beings, “Bloodchild” is a coming of age story, raising provocative questions about sex roles, self-sacrifice, colonization, and species-interdepence. Similarly, the artists featured in this exhibition ask complex questions via speculative artistic practices and challenge their own mediums to imagine alternate futures.
Nyame Oulynji Brown is an Afrofuturist installation artist working in the media of painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined—not just through unity and similarity, but by looking at the dynamics of difference. Brown received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture. He has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and the Richard Dreihaus Foundation Individual Artist Award, as well as a site-specific public commission for the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. His participation in Theaster Gates’ Black Artist Retreat in Chicago was followed by residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Brown was honored with a solo exhibition at The Museum of the African Diaspora, and has held solo exhibitions across the U.S., notably at the Hearst Museum at St. Mary’s College and the West Virginia University Art Museum. He has actively participated in group exhibitions in a variety of spaces in California, Illinois, Michigan and New York, and his work has been curated for inclusion at the Museum of Harlem, NY and the Prizm Art Fair at the Mana Contemporary in Miami.
Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based visual and performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), The Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Xandra Ibarra, Strobelite Honey (Jewel), 2019, gypsum cast dog food bag, resin, fur coat, steel hardware, anti-theft device, stolen stool, mirror, zinc, chain, jewelry, kate’s cigarettes, 18 x 8 x 44 in. Lohman Museum (NYC) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few. Recent residencies include San Francisco Public Library (via SF Arts Commission), Vermont Studio Center, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She has been awarded the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally.
Shara Mays is a visual artist who creates paintings which take the shape and form of both landscape and intuitive figuration. Her works are performances of both subconscious motions and are in constant conversation with the natural world seen throughout Northern California. Originally from Princeville, North Carolina, her art practice represents an evolution of narrative, from a focus on literal, southern landscapes, and family struggles, to chasing freedom through the act of painting. She received her BFA degree from The Corcoran College of Art and Design at George Washington University, and her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent shows include a solo show at Chandran Gallery in San Francisco, as well as group shows in galleries and museums such as the de Young Museum of San Francisco, Root Division in San Francisco, and Round Weather Gallery in Oakland, California. She has—in the past—been awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California from 2020 through 2022. Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
Gregory Rick creates what he terms “History Paintings” in which he confronts personal traumas and experiences in dialogue with history and the broader political world. His paintings are occupied by characters that serve as archetypes of his memories, introspection, and the absurdity and expansiveness of world history. He received his BFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) and his MFA in art practice from Stanford University. Rick has exhibited widely nationally, at Stanford Art Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Bass & Reiner Gallery, San Francisco, CA; slash art, San Francisco, CA; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Hair and Nails, Minneapolis, MN; Rochester Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and more. Recently, Rick has received the SFMOMA’s 2022 SECA Award, 15th annual San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award for 2022, and the Dedalus MFA Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation. He is also the recipient of the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award from SomArts, the Nathan Oliveira Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Hamaguchi Print Media Scholarship Award from CCA.
Stuart Robertson is a mixed media artist who paints, collages, and assembles images of Black life inspired by the nostalgia for his birthplace, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies of the African Diaspora’s future. His creative and educational practices prioritize interdisciplinary discourse and aesthetic innovation that better serve the representation of the Black diaspora in contemporary art. Robertson received a BA in studio art from Davidson College in 2015, a MSEd from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, and an MFA from Stanford University in June 2020. He is a recipient of the 2019 Cadogan Scholarship from the San Francisco Foundation, a 2020-21 Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2021 Honorary artist-in-residence at the Kala Art Institute. Stuart is currently the Summer 2022 Space Program, SF artist-in-residence, and the 2021-2023 teaching artist-in-residence at the Lawrenceville School, NJ. He has exhibited in Charlotte, Charlottesville, Kingston, New Jersey, New York City, Prague, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. as a prizewinning artist in The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today for the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
Leila Weefur is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Their interdisciplinary practice examines the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging. The work brings together concepts of sensorial memory, abject Blackness, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including The Kitchen NYC, Locust Projects Miami, The Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Smack Mellon. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of The Black Aesthetic. Through film and architectural installation, Leila Weefur examines the performative elements connected to systems of belonging, present in Black, queer, gender-variant life. They combine still- life imagery, gesture, and sound to communicate feeling and evoke sensorial responses. They construct environments that invite viewers into the possibility of understanding a narrative through the way bodies experience it. Through an entanglement of beauty and horror, the work combines concepts of sensorial memory, architectural psychology, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. They implement ways language can be used as a system for determining access and aid in disidentification.
