JAVA Feb 2020

Taking up a very different type of labor-intensive art
practice, we can say that Qualeasha Wood’s tapestry
pieces aim to be allegorical in nature, transformative
in meaning, and often qualify as transitional objects
in the realm of representation. They engage with
a more eclectic set of concerns that shows itself
through the queering of different archetypal figures.
In this sense, her works are in dialogue with ages
long past and the present moment, while hinting at
intimations of a future anterior. This is because her
work issues from a committed sense of picturing
Blackness anew by using figures that demonstrate
the kind of agency that is exercised over and against
the projections and constraints of normativity.
Another artist embracing the idea of Black
speculative futures as a liberatory force is AJ
Mcclenon. The work challenges the codified indexes
of the cultural imaginary by creating narratives that
disarm us through the play of productive fictions. Part
trenchant critique of the art world, part tongue-incheek
retort, there is little that Mcclenon won’t use in
order to put a new spin on historicity, narrativity, and
the retroactive rethinking of society’s expectations
about what Blackness means tout court.
Working in a more performative register, the art
of Tay Butler presents us with a living bricolage of
concerns about Blackness and its relationship to
the process of enculturation. Often using his body
as a canvas for memories and memoriums, Butler’s
works points to how white histories have often
made an exquisite corpse out of Black experience.
Butler’s performative aesthetic resists this horizon
of oppression by bringing the signs and signifiers
of Blackness together in suti – as a gesture, act, or
action of reclamation.
And perhaps this is what the oracles of the past
also achieved, namely, a sense of forbearance about
our possible futures. After all, the future is always
implicated in how we think about the place of
otherness, which can only be addressed by making
the paradoxes of the present visible in the hope
of seeing our way toward a better tomorrow. By
this measure, “Oracles of the Other” meets and
surpasses our expectations at every possible turn
by presenting us with timely visions of Blackness
inscribed under the dispositifs of Afro, Astro, and
Black speculative futures.
Oracles of the Other
February 21 – March 14, 2020
Modified Arts
407 E. Roosevelt St., Phoenix
modifiedarts.org
Jasilyn Anderson, Ancestors Live Within
Granville Carol, Ase
Qualeasha Woods, Test of Faith
Bee Spiderman, AfricanBlack Bushcraft
Tay Butler, Leah III
JAVA 19
MAGAZINE