Steve Locked included in group exhibition Intertwined: Akinbola, Locke, Rubin at Rivalry Projects in Buffalo, NY.
The institution's press release follows:
Intertwined brings together the work and dynamic practices of three contemporary Black artists: Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Steve Locke, and Tammie Rubin. As Black artists working in America, each of their bodies of work present manifold understandings of Black culture and lived experience, and their practices, too, are joined through the use of embroidery, sewing, painting, assemblage, and ceramics.
Intertwined is the culmination of years-long conversations with each artist to understand their methods, practices, artwork, and through this investigative process materials are transfigured in surprising ways. Each artist within this exhibit creates artwork that unpacks collective histories around race and identity, as well as the effects of white supremacy, and bodily violence.
Akinbola, Locke and Rubin each grapple with symbols of cultural violence, or those historically deemed by dominant culture to be lower or without merit, and the artwork included in this exhibition reclaims these sites to promote ideas of social justice.
Anthony Akinbola’s Camouflage series incorporates du-rags (do-rag, durag), colorful nylon and silk scarves used in the maintenance of black hair. The works push against the cultural and historical evocations surrounding black bodies while engaging with the predominantly white legacies of Color Field and Action painting. Akinbola’s works offer a couture synthesis of painting and sculpture, and reimagine the construction of identity through original treatments of color and texture. Characterizing his works as “metaphors for what a first-generation existence might look like,” Akinbola unpacks the rituals and histories separating Africa from Black America.
“The origins of do-rags are often linked to American slavery, when women wore head-wraps in the field to protect them from the punishing heat. In some regions in the South, black women were required by law to cover their hair as a mark of enslavement. These same women also used their head wraps as beauty embellishments that, depending on how they were tied, signified communal identities. Their current use—to create and preserve certain hairstyles—came later.”
Steve Locke’s artwork within Intertwined highlights the role of tapestries as vehicles for narrative within art history, while also seeing them as domestic tools of comfort and vehicles of texture. Within each of Locke’s tapestries Black historical figures and activists are presented and abstracted into mandala-like showers of geometry. The artist’s tapestries are a cultural matrix where aesthetics, history, sociology, folklore, and survival meet and deify Black figures whose visual presence embedded within each tapestry serves as a visual salve.
Each of Locke’s tapestries negotiate scale and visibility through their weaving, and each seek to reach into history and activate communal and shared histories through touch. Drawing inspiration from the material effects of tapestries over time, Locke’s artwork questions the viability of symbols offered into visual culture, while holding space for these objects to offer “comfort from the ancestors.” The resultant artwork looks to the ancestors of the civil rights movement as a mode of reflection while employing a cacophonous tension of figure, ground, form, and color to offer a corollary to the contemporary struggles of Black people within America.
Tammie Rubin is a visual artist who transforms familiar objects into mythic sculptures and installations that explore the gaps between the readymade and the handcrafted object. Her material-and-process-driven works open up dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations.
In speaking with Tammie Rubin about her Always & Forever (forever ever ever) series the artist builds from her signature cone forms from earlier series, with these remaining visible amid a tangle of organic and inorganic forms. Much of the organic work has been built from the Texas ball moss, a grey clump of growth that takes root in the branches of oak trees and bushes through the Texas landscape. The assumption about ball moss is that it’s a parasitic organism, draining the life of plants that it occupies. But the reality is more complicated, as it’s actually an epiphyte, a non-parasitic plant but it still plays a role. Tammie has been using it as a signifier of conflict and clashes. A metaphor for anxiety.
Similarly to Akinbola and Locke’s artwork, Rubin employs symbols of cultural conflict and turns them into sites of ritual, reverence, fear, and misalignment. Her signature cone forms are dotted with eyes, outlines of states, and inscribed with details of her family’s migration from the south to the north; they form an imposing cohort of hooded figures void of eyes or bodies, but alive with psychic malice. Rubin’s work is a reminder that Black lives continue to flourish, despite efforts to stop them.