Chakaia Booker
SpeakEasy
Chakaia Booker's abstract sculptures made from automobile tires address cultural, gender and environmental issues through their physicality and suggestive forms. Booker's work is often monumental in scale, and she achieves a range of effects with the pliable material. The forms and textures she creates fluctuate from industrial and supernatural to expansive and figurative.
Discarded rubber tires come with immediate associations of excess and colossal waste, but as sculptural material their characteristics take on new meaning. The skin-like membranes with worn treads and patterned, burnt surfaces are exploited by the artist. Her prints in the exhibition demonstrate a similar responsiveness to her process and materials, and expand her visual language in two dimensions. She marks the woodblock surfaces with drills, chisels and routers, mimicking her sculptural practice. With the printed material, she arranges torn and layered shapes to create figurative and abstract forms.
Booker's intention is to create an open dialogue with the viewer, allowing the final form of her work to evade a singular reading. SpeakEasy refers to elusive territory, obscured potential and the surprising consequences of the artist's manipulation of materials.
Selected Press
September 2, 2016
Events
September 27, 2016
Lou Jones, an established internationally renowned photojournalist, will discuss his recent photography project that aims to expose issues of race and culture in Egypt, Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Namibia.
panAFRICAproject attempts to redefine preconceived notions and encourage insight into the unique characteristics of diverse cultures and individual lives. The presentation and discussion will highlight the different ways that artists address African identity and the complexities surrounding assumptions and false perceptions of people of color.
October 18, 2016
October 19, 2016
October 27, 2016
WSRC Scholar, art historian and museum educator Annie Storr will lead art experiencing exercises through the Kniznick Gallery exhibition Chakaia Booker: SpeakEasy. Storr developed Exercises for the Quiet Eye to encourage patient reflection, appreciation and an attempt to avoid the rush to understand or determine a set interpretation for what we see.