This semester, I am taking a Contemporary Art class. Our first assignment was to write a paper in response to a recent show. With Tschabalala Self's recent ICA show "Out of Body," set to close at the beginning of September, I decided to visit the museum to see it in person before it closed. And I'm so glad I did! Below is a short excerpt from the art history paper I wrote in response to her work. The Multiplicity of Selves in Tschabalala Self’s Out of Body Exhibition at the ICA Boston
Tschabalala Self’s show “Out of Body,” at the ICA Boston, takes its name from a sewn fabric painting of the same title. Out of Body (the painting) hangs at the entrance to the exhibit, a preview of the show’s overarching themes of creation, identity, representation, and multiplicity. The canvas is composed of two female figures standing opposite each other, as if looking in a mirror. The figure on the left, adorned with yellow fabric, patterned with pints of red strawberries, looks critically at the figure in front of her. Her hands outstretched, she is in the process of, “constructing her own avatar” (ICA wall text). In describing this painting, the wall text goes on to suggest, “Perhaps this [painting] is a self-portrait of the artist, who, in her self-assuredness, confidently fashions the shapes and pieces at hand into lively figures.” (ICA wall text) Nearly complete, the brick-red figure on the right, with shoulder-length blue hair, yellow eyebrows, and red fingernails stands upright on the heel of her black and white floral foot, which is attached to a hyperextend salmon-colored leg with a few simple stiches. The hyper-mobile limbs of the figure on the right remind me of the Barbies I used to play with as a little girl, and the stories I used to conjure up about who they were and what they were doing. Using my imagination, I could change the name, age, clothes, thoughts, and backstories of the dolls in front of me; each of them a container for an endless number of possible identities. Like the characters in the writings of well-known author Zadie Smith, or the fictionalized self-portraits taken by contemporary photographer Cindy Sherman, in “Out of Body” (the ICA exhibition), Self’s figures, which span three galleries of the museum, can be read as representations of the artist’s multifaceted identity. In the essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” Smith champions the ability of successful authors to provide a convincing portal into the experience the characters they craft, people who may or may not resemble the author and who may or may not resemble the reader. (Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” October 24, 2019) In advocating for an author’s right to step outside of themselves, to step “out of body,” so to speak, and imagine other possibilities of personhood, Smith provides a productive framework for understanding Self’s portrait paintings. The figures Self creates are artists, avatars, mothers, pedestrians, consumers, jocks, goddesses and icons. “Multiplicity—which the artist defines as the notion that we are all made up of fragments of memories and identities—is central to her formal vocabulary” (from the introductory wall text). In contrast to Smith, who takes pleasure in writing from the perspective of a vast array of characters, that include people who are, “adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and goddess, not to mention alive and dead,” (Smith), Self’s representations are more focused. Self’s primary concern is “the iconographic significance of the Black female body in contemporary culture.” (From the “About” section on Tschabalala Self’s website) Her canvases, wall silhouettes and sculptures, composed of abstracted figures, are inspired by personal narratives, her relationships with family members and friends, and the her upbringing in Harlem, NY. “I don’t have the interest, and nor do I think I could earnestly speak about another lived experience outside my own.” (“At the ICA, ‘Out of Body’ Explores Color and Texture of Black Life In Harlem,” Pamela Reynolds) In the galleries of her ICA show, Self creates a world in which her lived experience and artistic imagination coexist, a place where her observations, memories, and feelings about the people and places she cares about, provide the inspiration for the assembly of abstracted figures on display.
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