Power, Traps, and Targets
Christopher Blay

Big Medium

Power, Traps, and Targets: New Work by Christopher Blay

The new work, described as Police brut, uses as a mode the printed shooting target, and the ready-made black power fist Afro Pick. Police brut is a double entendre that references both the style pioneered by Jean Dubuffet and the acts of violence meted out against Black people.

The artist’s proximity to writing and curation has been a fertile source for exploring language in the creation of this new body of work. “My day-to-day is full of language – I’m reading, writing, and thinking about language every day as a news editor, art critic, and curator – so it feels like a natural progression that my work should pivot towards coded and uncoded text.”

The language of Power, Traps, and Targets also incorporates codes and symbols as a way of illuminating, if allegorically, the narratives of violence, victims of violence, and what it means to bring these stories to the fore. Binary code, morse code, and sound graphs encode the works even as the symbols, such as the Nitien, or Kru Money, place the artist's own narrative in these stories. Nitien, Tien, or Dwin is from the Kru and Grebo tribes of Liberia and respectively the tribes the artist’s father and mother were born into. Although there is no definitive scholarship on the use of Nitien, one of the common accounts describes it as a symbol of protection, which is how it is used in these works.

The exhibition includes the sound installation Feel Me, which employs a haptic vest and the sound of gunshots. Visitors will stand in a predetermined spot in the gallery as they look at a black circle that contains the phrase.  There is also a series of paintings that combine the symbols of the target with the symbol of the Black Power afro pick and the Nitien object.

The exhibition will include Cyanotypes, polaroid transfers, and photographs in two series of prints. Power Light which uses sunlight from the Anniversary day of police killings, and Power Transfer, polaroid transfers made from pictures taken at the site of some of these killings.

Power, Traps, and Targets, ran September 10 through October 9, 2021.

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