ART CITIES:N.York-Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson is renowned for challenging the assumptions often present in collective notions of blackness. Johnson is among an influential, core group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials and images to explore themes of art history, literature, philosophy, and personal and cultural identity. After beginning his career working primarily in photography, Johnson has expanded into a variety of media, including text work, sculptural objects, installation painting, drawing, collage, and performance and choreography.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
The exhibition “The Hikers” brings together ceramic tile mosaics, collaged paintings, and a largescale sculpture that address Rachid Johnson’s recurring interest in currents of anxiety and escapism created by the political and social turmoil felt across the United States and around the globe. The exhibition borrows its title from Johnson’s latest film, a centerpiece of the exhibition, shot earlier this year on location in the mountains of Colorado. The exhibition unfolds through five rooms on Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s in a arrangement that echoes the fragmentation and accumulation of Johnson’s mosaics and collaged works on display. The viewer is first greeted by three monumental mosaics, each comprised of myriad materials familiar from the artist’s practice: multi-color ceramic and mirror tile, oil stick, black soap, wax, and branded red oak flooring. These works evolved out of Johnson’s “Anxious Men” and “Anxious Audiences” (2015-18), earlier series in which frenzied, abstracted faces were rendered in black soap and wax on a grid of white tiles. Here, his images of Broken Men and their fellows explode in a storm of bold hues, errant drips of wax, splashes of paint, and splintered surfaces. In these new works, Johnson pushes the anxiety of his figures to a breaking point, both metaphorically and physically. Whether portrayed alone or in groups, as in “Broken Crowds” (2019) these broken figures speak to collective and individual identities caught in the midst of shifting social realities. As injustices and racial conflicts in the US have continued to flare, Johnson’s works have likewise become more charged and dystopian than their earlier Anxious counterparts. Weathering this turmoil, “Untitled Bronze Head” (2019) is a large-scale bronze figure, standing 153 cm tall and brimming with verdure, recalls both its smaller ceramic counterparts and Johnson’s gridded metal structures. Johnson’s new sculpture takes on a shamanistic or fetishistic quality, proposing an organic framework, an ecosystem for which to care and in which to thrive. In an adjacent room, three recent works from Johnson’s series of “Escape Collages” extend across the walls in kaleidoscopic compositions of appropriated photographic imagery. The exhibition culminates with Johnson’s 16 mm film “The Hikers”, the film features two black male hikers (one ascending a mountain, another descending) who encounter each other as their paths cross. Their balletic movements are at once lithe and halting, athletic and awkward, challenging stereotypical notions of the forever rhythmic elegance of the black body in space. Collaborating with a choreographer, Johnson sought to express the psychological and physical consequences of life in the naturally challenging and too often unjust modern world, asking himself: “What are the movements like when a black man is walking past a police officer? Or when a black man is suffering from agoraphobia?”. The film debuted at the Aspen Art Museum accompanied by a dance performance, and was subsequently shown at Museo Tamayo, Mexico, earlier this year.
Info: Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 12/1119-25/1/20, Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
