Power Light series-5-25-20, Cyanotype on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag Fine Art Paper, 300gsm, 20x24”, 2021
Christopher Blay
Power, Traps and Targets
September 10 – October 9, 2021
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, runs September 10 through October 9, 2021. Member's preview, by appointment only, September 10, 12, 12 – 6pm. To schedule your visit please go to bigmedium.org/blay.
September 10 – October 9, 2021
Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #101
About the artist
Christopher Blay is the Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The artist, writer, and curator was the News Editor at Glasstire Magazine from 2019 - 2021 and served as curator of the Art Corridor Galleries at Tarrant County College, Southeast for the ten years prior to Glasstire. As a juror, Blay served on panels for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Southern Methodist University Meadows Museum's Moss/Chumley award, Big Medium’s Tito’s Prize, as well as numerous University gallery exhibitions including the recent student exhibitions at Texas State University in San Marcos.
Blay has used photography, video, sculpture, and performance in his numerous exhibitions, which consider the Black experience in America. The former Carter Community Artist has also received a Nasher Sculpture Center Microgrant, as well as The Otis and Velma Davis Dozier travel grant from the Dallas Museum of Art. His public works include the ongoing East Rosedale Monument Project in Fort Worth, Texas, and Dindi (for Annibel) in Dallas' Coombs Creek park near Oak Cliff. Blay is a 2003 Graduate of Texas Christian University with a BFA in Photography with a minor in Art History.
Christopher Blay