Curatorial
Through her installations, Heather Hart (b. 1975), explores the individual perception of reality and its influence on the acceptance of truth. She is fascinated by the ways humans relate to each other and in turn relate to materials by embellishing utilitarian spaces that merge physical, tactile, and psychological contradictions. Hart is currently a MFA candidate at Rutgers University. Her work was recently featured in an exhibition entitled, United Black Girls, at the Rush Arts Gallery in New York (2007). She was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship for Socrates Sculpture Park and a Skowhegan Fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 
Bayeté Ross Smith’s (b. 1976) photographic portraits borrow from “official” identification portraiture like passport, driver’s license and mug shot photographs. He uses the camera to document the ways in which identity is created, interpreted and expressed in the world. Ross Smith is curious about the individual’s sense of self, rather than the assumptions that are placed upon that individual. He received his MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2004. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally including the Goethe Institute in Accra, Ghana, a performance at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, in Warsaw Poland, the Leica Gallery in New York and The San Francisco Arts Commission. 
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s work alludes to histories that are ancestral and archaeological, while blurring them with stories that, in their urgency and immediacy, conjure current and impending moments. Bodies, as figures, become whispering coconspirators busy at the task of defacing dominant histories while themselves refusing to be obliterated, removed, or otherwise worked over. Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up in different parts of southern Africa and southwest Asia. She completed her MFA in May 2007 at the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sunstrum was awarded a Skowhegan Fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 
Stanley Squirewell (b. 1978) is dissolving and re-fabricating images that deal with the complex socio-economic issues and control mechanisms of self-perpetual slavery. He works in a combination of found objects, furniture, and old and new visual technology to assemble images that are metaphorically related to the condition of people of African ancestry. Squirewell received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Hoffberger School of Painting. His work was featured in a solo exhibition at Warehouse Gallery in Washington, DC (2005). Squirewell lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
San Francisco based artist Lauren Woods (b. 1979) hybrid media projects use video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated imagery to reflect on, reenvision, and rewrite the history of a postcolonial and global society. Her work, in the form of single-channel projections and large-scale multichannel video installations, contemplate and question cultural and collective memory and examine sociopolitical discourses. Woods earned her MFA in 2006 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Out The Box, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth Axtman (b.1980) received her MFA in 2006 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She creates photo and video based images that attempt to represent the spectrum of emotions within the African American experience. Being of mixed race, she in interested in exploring the accessibility to race privilege. Axtman uses identity as material in the construction of her work. Her work will be featured in Black Is Black Ain’t (2008) at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois. She was recently awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006.
Mansita Diawara makes images that are grounded in the literary. She pulls inspiration from scholars such as James Baldwin and Benjamin Buchloh to construct visual portals that inscribe apocalyptic messages. As an artist living and working in New York City she uses her camera to document sites that have become popularized by death, creating photographic eulogies to an absurd end. Diawara received her BFA in 2004 from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was awarded a residency with the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006. 
Russell Watson (b. 1973) is a multimedia artist that crisscrosses genres of performance, sculpture, photography and video. His practice investigates the persistence of ancestral memory and its relationship to the performative body. Rooted in the visual culture of the Caribbean his work seeks an idiosyncratic meta narrative that allows for the transcendence of the body as it strives for its full expressive potential. Originally from Barbados, Watson received his MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives and works in New York.
Nekisha Durrett’s (b. 1976) large-scale portraits reveal her interest in the ubiquity of popular media. She has arrived at a process that combines drawing and photography to illustrate fictive characters that bear likeness to graphic logos. Durrett earned her BFA at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. She went on to earn her MFA in photography in 2000 at the University of Michigan as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. Her work was most recently featured in Vote With Your Art at the OK Harris Gallery in New York.
Curatorial Statement
The artists included in this exhibition, Elizabeth Axtman, Lauren Woods, Mansita Diawara, Nekisha Durrett, Stanley Squirewell, Bayeté Ross Smith, Russell Watson, Heather Hart, and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum encapsulate a generation of creative inquiry that reflects the contemporary impulse to mine a variety of technological mediums in order to articulate a concept. Technology is a tool by which to consider the complexities of the body politic in the contemporary age, and to refract time and space through the mechanical lens. The exhibition is entitled Off Color as a means to describe the mechanized vision of the synthetic eye. These artists use photography and video to construct new associations between media and image that challenge authorship and visual representation, each taking a nuanced approach to their practice.
Nekisha Durrett’s large-scale portraits reveal her interest in the ubiquity of popular media. She has arrived at a process that combines drawing and photography to turn portraits of everyday people into illustrative characters that bear likeness to graphic logos. With this work, Durrett is attempting to blur the lines between reality and myth as part of an attempt to build new avenues for wonder and fantasy in the African American experience.
Bayeté Ross Smith is also working in the portrait genre. His photographs borrow from “official” identification portraiture like passport, driver’s license and mug shot photographs. He uses the camera to study the ways in which identity is created, interpreted and expressed in the world. Bayeté uses his work to deconstruct how surface appearance changes perceptions of class, education, and moral values of a given subject.
Heather Hart is also probing the individual perception of reality and its influence on the acceptance of truth. She is fascinated by the ways humans relate to each other and in turn relate to materials by embellishing utilitarian spaces that merge physical, tactile, and psychological contradictions. Hart is interested in the false comfort zones people seek in the illogical acts of race and class identification and personification.
Identity is a central notion in Elizabeth Axtman’s practice as well. She in interested the accessibility to race privilege and representing the spectrum of emotions within the African American experience. In her work she evokes humor, anger and desire to trigger gut reactions that force viewers to confront the complexities of race and gender in the contemporary moment.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is blurring the past and present with allegorical stories that position the body as a dominant supernatural figure. Sunstrum works in video, installation, sculpture, drawing and photography to communicate a self-reflexive journey through the systems of history and ancestry.
Russell Watson is attempting to transcend the corporeal structure by using digitally enhanced images to sculpt hybrid forms. He sutures elements of the human body and reconfigures them into organic shapes. He is utilizing the transformative nature of the masquerade to produce new dimensions of meta-physical experience.
Stanley Squirewell is similarly dissolving and re-fabricating images. Instead of using human body parts, Squirewell creates digital collages and sculptures using a combination of found objects, furniture, and old and new photographs which reference stereotypical African body types.
To create her assemblages that are metaphorically related to the condition of people of African ancestry, Lauren Woods’ fuses video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated imagery to reevaluate the history of postcolonial and global society. In viewing Woods’ work one is often confronted with conflicting thoughts of sly wit, humor and foreboding.
Mansita Diawara’s work is grounded in literature. She pulls inspiration from scholars such as James Baldwin and Benjamin Buchloh to construct visual portals that inscribe apocalyptic messages. She documents sites that have become popularized by death, creating photographic eulogies to an absurd end.
Off-Color Co-curators Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks
Hank Willis Thomas is an artist and curator that lives and works in San Francisco and New York City. He received an M.F.A in photography and a M.A. in Visual Criticism at the California College of the Arts. He was the recipient of the 2006 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship Award and the 2007 Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Kalia Brooks is a New York based curator and writer. She received her M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts. She is currently Public Programs Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
June 18, 2008 at 6:24 am
Mansita Diawara, Lauren Woods and Stanley Squirewell seemed to be the artists who successfully achieved the concept proposed in the OFF COLOR exhibition.
Subversively layered and thought provoking while resisting the examples of
self exploitation which is has been so pervasive in contemporary art for a few years now. When artists start using their bodies to propose fantasies without critical insight or direction then one has to wonder what examples are being used or followed. Maybe this is what lacks in todays world. Examples to hold us responsible for our actions instead of entertaining for the sake of being accepted.
Please, let’s rid ourselves of the shuffling shackles!
September 19, 2008 at 9:50 pm
[...] College (Atlanta, GA); Bare Walls, No Boundaries at the Wadsworth Antheneum (Hartford, CT); and Off Color at Rush Arts Gallery (NYC), which opens today. Her video “Where’s the Party At?” [...]
January 26, 2009 at 9:37 am
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
-Malcolm X
I won’t compare my thoughts on the rest of the artists in this exhibition because that is not the point of this text. Instead, I want to express my concern for critical perspective on a growing trend of artists of color who address gender and race issues without understanding how the media and audience they reach out to perceives their efforts.
Elizabeth Axtman’s work in this exhibition and the Black is Black Aint show were both examples of ambivalence and without any critical effort in articulating concerns and issues with race, stereotypes and the never ending “tragic mulata.”
The concerns and themes Axman raises are real and need to be addressed but it is a complex issue and needs a bigger platform. What she more often does is “fan the fire” perpetuate a stereotype or exoticize her presence as a “mixed race” person as if others in the exhibition were excluded from the same concerns. Being of mixed race does not mean you are unique or exotic but it does sell more movie tickets for Halle Berry. That said, it is this reliance on her light-skin tone that dominates her videos. Her own presence is the product selling the video but there are contradictions precipitating through those works because they end up being low tech music videos operating much like they are supposed to and we all know those videos are not intended or meant or do much critically.
I recently saw an image of Axtman on the cover of an exhibition catalogue in Atlanta. It was sad because I am not pointing fingers nor am I saying she is a failed artist but actually criticize the institutions, curators and faculty whose laziness and uncritical eye allow for this work to be part a spokes person of sorts for a topic much deeper and serious than an “entertaining music video.”