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On view via August 26, the present, titled I’ve Identified Rivers, marks Hank Willis Thomas‘ first-ever presentation with Tempo. This debut exhibition will showcase a choice of new retroreflective artworks—which reveal latent pictures relying on lighting and the attitude of the viewer—created by Thomas this yr.
During the last ten years, Thomas has mastered the retroreflective medium, creating combined media works that reveal two distinct scenes transfigured by each ambient and flash lighting. Seen from one perspective, these artworks current daring figurations, abstractions, and landscapes in saturated colours; seen from one other, fragmented archival scraps from Thomas’s manufacturing of different retroreflective works over the past decade are revealed. As these components converge and remodel, they make clear new layers of pictures, concepts, and meanings which are hidden in plain sight. Thomas’s retroreflective works may also be understood as private data of his inventive course of and the historic references that recur all through his follow.
The colourful compositions on view in Thomas’s upcoming presentation with Tempo in LA are steeped in artwork historical past, and so they communicate to the artist’s continued explorations of abstraction via the lenses of colonization, globalization, and appropriation. Alluding to the work of Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, and Malick Sidibé, the artist’s latest retroreflective works mine the complicated origins and histories of recent artwork throughout Africa, the US, and Europe.
The exhibition’s title, I’ve Identified Rivers, references Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” first revealed in The Disaster journal in July 1921. Then a little-known author, Hughes would later turn into an icon of the Harlem Renaissance. Water is a central topic in each this poem and Thomas’s present in LA—it’s positioned as a visible anchor, a degree of entry, a mover of individuals, a container of historical information. The journey described in Hughes’s poem, like Thomas’s work, just isn’t linear or simply traced. As a substitute, readers of the poem and viewers of Thomas’s artwork are invited to analyze particulars and journey to sudden locations.
Thomas works throughout sculpture, screen-printing, images, combined media, video, and set up. By way of his follow, he examines topics associated to mass media, well-liked tradition, consumerism, and identification, typically making use of perspectival nuance as a part of these explorations. A skilled photographer, Thomas is deeply fascinated with each the making and consumption of pictures, along with his investigations into subjectivity and notion informing his work in images and different mediums. The artist can also be recognized for his galvanizing public works, which showcase his private dedication to social activism and encourage participation and contribution from the viewer. His everlasting public installations might be present in Downtown Brooklyn, New York; the Boston Widespread; Chicago O’Hare Worldwide Airport; and on the grounds of the Nationwide Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, amongst different places across the US.
Amongst Thomas’s current tasks is the large-scale bronze sculpture The Embrace (2023), which was unveiled on the Boston Widespread in January 2023. This everlasting memorial is impressed by an archival {photograph} of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his spouse, Coretta Scott King, embracing after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. As such, The Embrace might be understood as an ode to collaboration, love, and equality, reflecting Thomas’s ongoing inquiries into financial and racial justice. Thomas’s reconfiguration of a two-dimensional {photograph} right into a large- scale, three-dimensional monument crystallizes a single second in time, chatting with the significance of gesture, conviviality, and group.
Subsequent yr, two new installations by Thomas can be completely unveiled on the East and West entrances of the brand new Judkins Park Station in Seattle. These public works heart on the life and legacy of musical icon Jimi Hendrix, whose hometown was Seattle. His forthcoming public artwork tasks additionally embody With These Fingers: A Memorial to Honor the Enslaved and Exploited, set to open at Davidson Faculty in North Carolina in 2025.
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