Letterpressed
We're glad to see
Carl Pope is still stirring shit up in the art world. Carl is perhaps best known for his engrossing (some would say "excruciating") video, "Palimpsest," from the
2000 WhiBi in which the artist used his own body as a living canvas for various forms of branding and tattooing, evoking by turns ritual scarification, dehumanization, and a brutal form of beautification. Now Carl opens a show of new work at
Momenta Art in Brooklyn (20 October).
We've been watching Carl mount his provocative posters in
various spaces for the last year, and the Momenta show extends these same concerns and techniques in what will be Carl's first New York solo show. In this ongoing poster project, Carl typically arranges the posters, which are made using self-consciously old-fashioned
letterpress methods, as a full composition in the space, paying attention to color, balance, rhythm and other painterly concerns. This will be the first such installation in which the posters can, in his words, "vibrate" without competing with other work around it.
The posters' quotes and phrases constitute a universe of responses to unnamed questions about blackness and African Diasporic identity. Pulling sometimes from popular films, sometimes from literature, and sometimes purely from a black subconscious, Carl uses the posters as points of light to delineate a vision of blackness in the same way that stars articulate the blackness and depth of outer space.
We're glad to see that Carl will be helping to break in Momenta's new Williamsburg space. This is only the second exhibition in the new space and the new space's first solo. The show runs through 20 November.
