CANCELED: Emerging Visions Exhibition: Alex Callender in the LookOut Gallery

Thu, March 19, 2020 4:00 PM - Fri, April 17, 2020 3:00 PM at The LookOut Gallery

Exhibit Title: Difficult Love (What Scatters and Then Comes Back Together)

The 9th Annual Perspectives in African-American Experience: Emerging Visions Residency and Exhibition

Paintings, drawings, and wallpapers exploring a speculative history of the Black Atlantic performed by women channeled from colonial paintings and archives.

Artist: Alex Callender 

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 4-6 p.m. in the LookOut

Co-Sponsors:

• Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives
• Department of English
• RCAH Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity
• with support from a OIII Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant 

For the 9th Annual RCAH Perspectives on African American Experience: Emerging Visions Residency and Exhibition, the LookOut Gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by Alex Callender. In large-scale paintings, drawings, and wallpapers, Callender explores a fictional Atlantic history, performed in scenes by women channeled from colonial paintings and archives. The exhibition considers how identities are formed in love and in resistance to the brutality of colonial world making, and who belongs and who does not in Western canonical imagery.

Weaving together written and material histories of the Black Atlantic, Callender imagines Black women’s relationships to self, collective, power, and the (in)visibility of their labor. Remixing the landscapes and subjectivities she encounters in colonial archives, Callender asks viewers to consider how painting constructs myths that mask economic realities. Her figures evoke lineages that have been lost or interrupted and are being recovered by generations of Black women, assembling a past from archives, oral histories, fragments, story-telling, and imagination. 

The exhibition includes a reading area where viewers can encounter literature and resources that have been important to Callender’s development of this body of work, from Aimé Césaire to Octavia Butler.

Alex Callender’s studio practice incorporates painting, drawing and installation to explore intersections between myth, identity and material culture. Through the visual forms of historical narrative, repurposed archival imagery, and speculative fictions, she considers questions of race and borders, environmental instability, and hybridized landscapes. Callender has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has held studio residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Drawing Center’s Open Session program, the Art in Embassies Program, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Callender is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College.

 

The 9th Annual Emerging Visions: Perspectives in African American Experience Residency & Exhibition

Emerging Visions is an annual, week-long teaching and exhibition residency in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) for emerging and mid-career artists whose work reflects on African-American experience past or present and explores art as social activism.

A call for applicants was circulated nationally in Fall 2019. 

 

RCAH LookOut Gallery

Location
Residential College in the Arts and Humanities
Snyder-Phillips Hall, Second Floor
362 Bogue Street
East Lansing, Michigan 48825

Hours
Monday to Friday from noon to 3 p.m.

Web
RCAH LookOut! Art Gallery

Social Media
https://www.facebook.com/rcahlookoutgallery