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Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York is proud to present Mixtape, the first New York solo exhibition by multimedia artist Felandus Thames. Mississippi-born Felandus Thames, who received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, creates a broad and varied body of artwork that includes photography, painting, screen-printing, multimedia works, and installations. His diverse oeuvre references American and cultural history to create a narrative around race, politics, culture, and history. The works in Mixtape make use of Harlem Renaissance poetry, modern hip hop lyrics, Jazz poetry, spoken word performance, and African American archetypes to draw parallels between historical and contemporary African American identity. |
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“The works in Mixtape make use of Harlem Renaissance poetry, modern hip hop lyrics, Jazz poetry, spoken word performance, and African American archetypes to draw parallels between historical and contemporary African American identity.”
Mississippi-born Felandus Thames, who received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, creates a broad and varied body of artwork that includes photography, painting, screen-printing, multimedia works, and installations. His diverse oeuvre references American and cultural history to create a narrative around race, politics, culture, and history. The works in Mixtape make use of Harlem Renaissance poetry, modern hip hop lyrics, Jazz poetry, spoken word performance, and African American archetypes to draw parallels between historical and contemporary African American identity.
In Thames‚ important new work, I Would Rather Be, children’s wooden blocks are painted matte black and arranged in a monochromatic and modernist grid. Key Jo Lee states of the work. The modest size of the blocks yield an intimately scaled object that necessitates close inspection. In it we find that the 2Pac lyric, “I rather be nigga so we can get drunk and smoke [weed] all day”, has interrupted the planar uniformity. The utterance, simultaneously old and new, of stereotypical blackness is one that our social liberality might bristle against, but which persists and refuses evasion. A single word has been excised from the lyric‚ Id rather be ya nigga…, meant to be a statement of seduction. The excision undoes the gender specificity of the statement and makes it a statement of desire to be a nigga, yours or not, period. That we must stand close to it, lean in to read its covert message amplifies its meaning, the I becomes the viewer/reader and as such the desire‚voiced aloud or internally‚becomes our own. In a similar work, Gil Scott-Heron, The Bitter Truth Lives On, these same painted wooden blocks reveal a quote from Gil Scott-Heron, an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author known for his work as a spoken word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, in his recent, “Harlem Prose”‚ series, Thames illustrates verses by Harlem Renaissance poet Melvin B. Tolson through the painstaking removal of bristles from hair brushes.
“Mixtape” will be on view from September 6 – October 27, 2012 at Jenkins Johnson Gallery. Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6, 6 to 8 pm. Closing Reception and Panel Discussion: Thursday, October 25, 6 to 8 pm New York
