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Politics, Protest and the Pandemic
Melanie Baker, Dread Scott, Jorge Tacla -
Melanie Baker
Melanie Baker's oversize graphite and charcoal drawings are portraits of contemporary and historic politicians and businessmen. Her compositions are cropped precisely so as to obscure their identity, while also zeroing in on the symbols of their authority. Baker's subjects' facelessness is a comment on the mutability of their identities. Political movements rise and fall, and regimes change, but the institutions that concentrate that power in the hands of a few remain the same. Many of the artist's works are larger than lifesize, and their scale is both impressive and overwhelming. The deep black of her charcoal is like that of a bottomless pit--impossible to escape once entered.
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Dread Scott
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art "disgraceful" and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Scott became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
The artist plays with fire--metaphorically and sometimes literally--as when he burned $171 on Wall Street and encouraged those with money to add theirs to the pyre. He has used ashes as a material repeatedly since the late '80s. Scott's work asks viewers to look soberly at America's past and our present.
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Jorge Tacla
Jorge Tacla creates tactile, ghost-like paintings that blur the formal boundaries between abstraction and representation to present an unsettling view of the world. In this recent series of paintings, all created during the pandemic, the artist shows different violent events that took place over the past year. Paintings dated to October and May show protests in the artist's homes of Santiago and New York City, respectively. The former was a protest against inequality in the country, and the latter were Black Lives Matter rallies. The two paintings from Beirut depict scenes from the massive, fatal explosion of ammonium nitrate that rocked the city earlier this summer. All of these events represent dark and complicated moments in history, and their effects were felt across the globe. They represent some of the major flash points of our year.
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