Homage to the Auction Block (2019 and ongoing)
This work comes out of my direct engagement with color theory, portraiture and memory. The experience of working on Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie and the Auction Block Memorial have lead me into a new direction in painting. I am thinking about how modernist idioms can and do contain a racial history.
The work posits that the basic Modernist form is indeed the slave auction block. With the discovery of that form, all the other forms became possible.
In Homage to the Auction Block, I want to convey a sense of mapping and surveying into each painting. As such, each of these works retain some residue of their creation and conception. In the beginning, I used tape to get clean edges but my research into the work of Josef Albers lead me to abandon a taped line for a painted one. It gives the paintings a sense of humanity necessary to their conceptual underpinnings.
The application of flat color, the use of the grid, and the reliance on “primary structures” have art historical meanings central to Western Modernism-and its notion that form could be separated from its content. The works retain some residue of their and conception with guided and gridlines at times visible in the hand painted surface. Proportion and chromatic relationships are explored to varying visual effect. The use of the “auction block” motif literally organizes these modernist relations around the central symbol of chattel slavery in the Americas. The work reframes the work of modernism around the shape that made it possible.
My continued exploration of Josef Albers and his impact as a theorist, educator, and artist is a catalyst and an affirmation.