Attempt to Imagine: Possibility for Repair, at CIA
Possibility For Repair, on view at the Reinberger Gallery through February 9, opened just three days after the November 5 election. The show is an attempt to imagine reparations for the systemic elite white supremacy and unchecked, hegemonic European-Christian values that buttresses our collective American histories. Artists Lyndon Barrois, Jr., Mark Thomas Gibson, Sarah Kabot, M. Carmen Lane, and Jessica Pinsky explore what repairing the oppressive, genocidal, torturous systems and apparatuses of contemporary culture might look like, circa 2024-25.
Like any good conversation, Possibility For Repair moves excitedly between points, each artist amplifying their theses, some taking macro approaches to the topic, others, turning inward. There are risks to dreaming publicly, and Sarah Kabot, Jessica Pinksy, and Lyndon Barrois, Jr. turn their lenses to sign-image details that matter in our conditioning as human subjects of modern capitalism. Mark Thomas Gibson and M. Carmen Lane take more overt and didactic approaches to the theme of imagining reparations, with multi-media narratives and intersectional analysis in the case of Lane, and humorous approaches to deconstructing American history, in Mark Thomas Gibson’s works.
In its totality, Possibility is visually stunning, with Pinsky’s large-scale gold and white fiber swath reluctantly inviting us into the gallery. The hesitation is, in part, due to the sheer beauty of Pinsky’s “A truth can stare you right in the face.” Made of synthetic fibers handwoven on a digital loom, it is best viewed from a distance. As you get closer to the piece, however, you begin to see enlarged children’s drawings. Indeed, the renderings, created by Pinsky’s twins Ben and Mira, are magically simplistic. In context to the enormous work, Ben and Mira’s drawings are still tiny and difficult to identify, situated as they are in the sea of sinuous white and gold fiber.
Kabot and Barrois take theoretical approaches to the theme. Barrois uses film stills in his work to order to “explore themes of perception, [historical] narrative, and cultural memory.” The artist appropriates film stills as vehicles for understanding our past and present. “Tomorrow in hindsight,” a vinyl wallpaper installation originally created in 2019, borrows a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film, To Catch a Thief . The image aptly depicts forward movement: the viewer is visually transported into the passenger seat of an automobile, with the rearview mirror showing what is past, or has been recently passed. Kabot’s drawings carefully depict and reflect original newspaper articles and photographs of trees, bodies of water, and other natural elements. Through scanning, folding, and hand-coloring, the images come to resemble Rorschach blots, creating shapes that feel strangely familiar. She obliterates media images, making them formally beautiful, inscrutable. That paradoxically reflects the veil of “truth” offered through a 24-7 news cycle.
The simultaneity Barrois evokes in “Tomorrow in hindsight,” is present in Possibility For Repair through the works of Mark Thomas Gibson and M. Carmen Lane. The latter artist creates a complex installation in a smaller gallery at the back of the space that could stand alone as its own exhibition. The small space includes references to stone/earth, pottery/vessel, water, and, through a video piece, the expanse of land stretched out before us as highway, perhaps recalling the cultural decimation of people living on this “American” land long before white, Christian Europeans decided to colonize and destroy anyone or anything that got in His way. Indeed, it is in this context that we must consider repairing, which in political terms means reparations.
A nation founded on philosophies of equality, liberty, and fraternity, was in Truth literally grounded in mass destruction and exploitation of resources. The attempt at eradication of the human beings and cultures already here is fundamentally flawed and corrupt.
The white-washing of history is the core of Gibson’s large-scale, comic and comical renderings of scenes from American History. The “Town Crier” series is dystopian and humorous, as he imagines himself, or an alter-ego to his own multifaceted identity as “a black male, a professor, and an American history buff.” Through drawing, painting, and print media, Gibson redraws recognizably “heroic” images, depicting the truths not often revealed in basic high school American History courses. “The One About George Washington,” is a beautifully detailed ink drawing of Washington leading the troops to revolution. His motley crew of soldiers are barely “on board” with his mission: one figure vomits off the side toward the viewer, and Gibson depicts Washington as a spitting mad man, whose boot rests on a black man’s head. Washington is being reigned in at the bow of the vessel by a terrified looking man at the helm, who is holding him back with a rod to his chest.
Each artist in Possibility For Repair creates conversation about our current dystopian reality, hinting at how we might reimagine history and mass media—particularly “the news”–in simultaneously disruptive ways, whether by seeing these narratives through the lenses of everyone in the room, or by obscuring their power, rendering the messages illegible. These approaches are not novel to the history of art, but they nonetheless make for an important conversation, especially following the outcome of the election of 2024.
It is Lane who comes closest to giving us a living example of reparations in community. Their black and white portrait of Cleveland Heights Mayor Kahlil Seren is accompanied by a poem, which the artist reads to you through headphones. Seren, a biracial man who publicly identifies as Black and through legislation has been supportive of LGBTQ rights, comes closer than most for his challenging of heterosexual—albeit socially “liberal”–whites living in Cleveland Heights. His own personal narrative is central to his work as he makes queer identities more visible by painting rainbow-colored crosswalks throughout the inner-ring suburb. Lane’s inclusion of his personal-political narrative in their installation reminds us what is possible… that there is a possibility for repair.
Possibility for Repair
November 8, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Reinberger Gallery, Cleveland Institute of Art
11610 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44106
216.421.7000
You must be logged in to post a comment.