Community Bandstand, 2009
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Hauser&Wirth
Collection
Welded brass, wood, DAK CB radio, shea butter
228.6 x 121.9 x 35.6 cm
While Rashid Johnson’s gravitation toward some materials (shea butter, record covers, incense) seems to suggest specific signifiers or pop cultural references, he treats these merely as starting points, seeking to discover larger, even universal, themes that might be latent in their DNA. As a result, the selection of materials becomes the foundation of a personal cosmology that bears traces of its source materials while simultaneously transcending them. This process is well illustrated by sculptures such as Community Bandstand, that Johnson has equipped with working CB (community band) radios and/or steel and brass antenna-like constructions. “My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien. But the thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.”[i]
Part reliquary, part painting, part assemblage, and part pirate radio station, and indebted to cultural figures as diverse as Carl Andre, Joseph Cornell, Eldridge Cleaver, and Eric Dolphy, these sculptures are representative of attempts to reach out into the unknown, to acknowledge the confines imposed by received notions of identity and thereby escape them. Just as the works’ materiality is an assemblage of distinct attitudes toward the symbolic potential of the physical world, the poetic associations they call into play are indicative of a mystical, exploratory countenance.
[i] Maxwell Williams, The Accumulation of Self: How Rashid Johnson´s Art Adds Up, October 2014, Art in America Online Magazine, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/the-accumulation-of-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up/
*1977 in Chicago, USA | Living and working in New York, USA
228.6 x 121.9 x 35.6 cm
While Rashid Johnson’s gravitation toward some materials (shea butter, record covers, incense) seems to suggest specific signifiers or pop cultural references, he treats these merely as starting points, seeking to discover larger, even universal, themes that might be latent in their DNA. As a result, the selection of materials becomes the foundation of a personal cosmology that bears traces of its source materials while simultaneously transcending them. This process is well illustrated by sculptures such as Community Bandstand, that Johnson has equipped with working CB (community band) radios and/or steel and brass antenna-like constructions. “My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien. But the thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.”[i]
Part reliquary, part painting, part assemblage, and part pirate radio station, and indebted to cultural figures as diverse as Carl Andre, Joseph Cornell, Eldridge Cleaver, and Eric Dolphy, these sculptures are representative of attempts to reach out into the unknown, to acknowledge the confines imposed by received notions of identity and thereby escape them. Just as the works’ materiality is an assemblage of distinct attitudes toward the symbolic potential of the physical world, the poetic associations they call into play are indicative of a mystical, exploratory countenance.
[i] Maxwell Williams, The Accumulation of Self: How Rashid Johnson´s Art Adds Up, October 2014, Art in America Online Magazine, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/the-accumulation-of-self-how-rashid-johnsonrsquos-art-adds-up/
*1977 in Chicago, USA | Living and working in New York, USA
Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history.After studying in the photography department of the Art Instituteof Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media – including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation. Johansons work has been exhibited all around the world, he won the David C. Driskell Prize in 2012 and released his movie Native Son. As well as his books Rashid Johnson: sharpening my oyster knife and Rashid Johnson: Shelter. In 2015 he won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Television Movie for his movie.
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License as well as from Hauser & Wirth .
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License as well as from Hauser & Wirth .