Group Show

At a time when people across the globe feel increasing discontent and there is great unease about the future, the artists in SOUL RECORDINGS present works that address a number of social and political issues underlying some of these conditions, offering personal responses filled with poignancy, confidence, strength, and resilience. Culled from a multinational and cross-generational landscape, these artists explore the roots and context that shape their work through a broad range of perspectives and media. In the process, they share their own stories, reclaim appropriated culture, and forge a path through empathy and resistance. For them, the personal is political. SOUL RECORDINGS challenges us to contemplate difficult questions—and these artists invite us to listen to their multivalent answers.

Bronx-based Lex Brown is an artist, writer, and performer whose work creates interplay between personal and emotional experience in relation to large-scale systems of social and economic organization. Brown's recent work considers the intersection of pre-fab neocolonial architecture and the aesthetics of the first e-commerce boom as a backdrop for upwardly mobile Black family life, of which she is a product. Brown states: "In the process of dismantling my own internalized racism and sexism, I build new characters, worlds, and linguistic relationships. The work reaches the viewer through an experience of variance: fluctuations between humor and seriousness open up a space for personal connection and examination."

Brooklyn-based Caitlin Cherry combines painting, sculpture, and installation with references to history and political current events. Kara Walker, after working with Cherry during her MFA at Columbia University, has said that Cherry's work "break[s] apart the rules governing painting and sculpture, and tease[s] that unsettling sweet spot that disarms viewers' expectations." Case in point, Cherry's portraits present a codified idea of achievement that questions and reshapes cultural notions of race and success. Distorted like comic-book characters on steroids, suggestions of racist stereotypes that might be implied by exaggerated facial features are combined with serious attitude and humor as each subject oozes a knowing awareness and rejection of objectification with style.

Kentucky-based, Jamaican born multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson confronts issues of gender, race, and class through sprawling installations that often reference real and specific acts of violence against people of color. Patterson's affective tapestry, titled ...they were beautiful like the moon...they were just babies...they were just girls... (...when they grow up), 2017, is colorful and festive with competing patterns and elaborate beading -- at first glance, reading as celebratory, perhaps a children's birthday party. The titular "girls," however, are riddled with holes and shinny blood-red Mardi Gras beads drip throughout the scene. As viewers, Patterson's work forces us to become aware of our ability to witness.

Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts creates visually arresting collages and prints that encourage conversations about girlhood, vulnerability, body/self image, popular culture, and the legacies of racism. Combining found photographs, painting, text and drawing, Roberts challenges the myths and stereotypes attached to young Black girls. Roberts' multifaceted collages feature figures that eschew cliché, instead opting to build their own complicated subjectivities from multiple sources and exemplifying the complexities of Black identity. Roberts states: "I believe having ones identity dismantled, marginalized, and regulated to non-human status constitutes action. This led me to making confrontational-based work that challenged the notions of self and perceived self."