Two shows at G Fine Art in Washington, DC suggest that Black faces can’t be taken at face value. Iona rozeal brown marked out a territory of iconography after a 2001 trip to Japan where she was inspired by the ganguros—Japanese youth who curly permed their hair, darkened their skin, and dressed in the latest hip-hop fashions. In brown’s now-famous blackface images, geisha-styled b-girls wear cornrows and door-knocker earrings; b-boys and sumos morph into a new kind of phat. In the current series, Brown paints directly on wood, harkening perhaps to the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints that she freely samples. (Brown is also a DJ.) The result is more earthy, more folksy, than her work on paper. If you haven’t seen brown’s dexterous blending of Afro and Asian identities, don’t miss this chance to glimpse these wood works.
Across the gallery is Jefferson Pinder’s Juke--a multi-unit video piece where each of 10 monitors is a headshot of a Black person lip-synching. The voice coming out of the attached headphones is so dissimilar from the voice one would imagine the lip-syncher to possess. White-sounding punk rants and country twangs emanate from Black (read: urban music) mouths. Pinder’s Juke is another kind of racial incongruity: at first sight, we think we know who these Black subjects are, only to see them recast through their performance of so-called white people’s music. Both brown and Pinder ask: what’s ours, what’s theirs, and, most provocatively, what’s shared? Brown and Pinder's works are currently on display until January 6, 2007.
