DESIRE, Johnny Was
What can the creative process tell us about desire, about interiority? How do the meditative practices of embroidery, sewing, and drawing become implicated in memory, identity, vulnerability, and subjectivity?
…Her latest installation, DESIRE, Johnny Was, broadens her thought process about the practice of creating art and aesthetic experiences. Flora and fauna embellish a rose-colored space lit atmospherically to mimic an 18th century boudoir. Familiar vegetation, flowers, and birds from both the Caribbean and the US occupy central spaces in DESIRE, Johnny Was. …What we see is a dramatic staging of a “diasporic boudoir”. Perhaps the centerpiece of the installation is a pink and beige-colored, ornate 18th century-styled dresser with an ornamental mirror. Quotations taken from 13th century Persian Sunni Muslim poet Rumi, Romantic Age poet William Blake, and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes decorate the light gray-colored velvet lining of each drawer of the dresser. The quotations are embroidered using varying shades of purple thread: color and patterns are essential to this tactile-rich installation. A coquettish invitation is given to enter the room, to open the drawers and explore the quotations and luxuriate in the excessive sensuousness that comes from the pleasure of the haptic. Viewing this room, walking into this room, the viewer is allowed to explore the relationship between language and material, between allegory and narration, asking how do desire, yearning, want, and need operate in the historical process of cultural transformation that highlights diverse African diasporic experiences?
…Her latest installation, DESIRE, Johnny Was, broadens her thought process about the practice of creating art and aesthetic experiences. Flora and fauna embellish a rose-colored space lit atmospherically to mimic an 18th century boudoir. Familiar vegetation, flowers, and birds from both the Caribbean and the US occupy central spaces in DESIRE, Johnny Was. …What we see is a dramatic staging of a “diasporic boudoir”. Perhaps the centerpiece of the installation is a pink and beige-colored, ornate 18th century-styled dresser with an ornamental mirror. Quotations taken from 13th century Persian Sunni Muslim poet Rumi, Romantic Age poet William Blake, and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes decorate the light gray-colored velvet lining of each drawer of the dresser. The quotations are embroidered using varying shades of purple thread: color and patterns are essential to this tactile-rich installation. A coquettish invitation is given to enter the room, to open the drawers and explore the quotations and luxuriate in the excessive sensuousness that comes from the pleasure of the haptic. Viewing this room, walking into this room, the viewer is allowed to explore the relationship between language and material, between allegory and narration, asking how do desire, yearning, want, and need operate in the historical process of cultural transformation that highlights diverse African diasporic experiences?
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Jerry Philogene, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, American Studies Department Dickinson College 4/17/2018 |
