5.29.24 — There Will Be Blood
Diedrick Brackens calls his two-gallery show “Blood Compass,” and, yes, there will be blood. It may not flow again before your eyes, but you can feel it coming and see fresh evidence of bloodshed.
A man raises his arms above his head, about to bring them down on the pig at his feet—a wild one, but not wild enough to know when to escape. Others carry a deer hung from a pole, on its way to or from slaughter. Another man stands tall, facing front, the dead center of a work seemingly stained in blood. Elsewhere the sun has turned to crimson, for the most chilling of sunsets, unless it is a blood moon.
“The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” Brackens might be quoting the Book of Joel, but if not his work still has biblical and human resonance. The man set against the red also stands before arches to either side, as if presiding over a cathedral and its rituals. The architecture frames nothing but black, the shadows of a greater depth, but then another circle is itself black, and presiding compass circles are implicit elsewhere as well. The man facing front also spreads his arms and legs in the pose of a well-known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The extremities of his Vitruvian Man, arms and legs doubled, define a circle.
Leonardo was describing ideal proportions, but also what it is to be human. Brackens, too, is concerned for iconicity and reality, but for him either one can mark a descent into animal nature. He, too, is also looking to the past for models, but not to ancient Rome. He is black and still in his thirties, and his figures are black silhouettes, with telling exceptions. Black and white silhouettes crawl together on the ground, and it is not clear who has conquered whom. America here has a messy but brutal history.
He looks back with his medium as well, at Jack Shainman through June 1. Weaving is everywhere today, to the point of cliché and multiple points of reference. It can quote folk art in New England and the deep South, Native American art, European art, or the art of Africa—and Brackens can happily embrace them all, in search of a specifically African American history. Mostly it appears these days as a statement of pride, but he cares about the dark side of that history as well. He retains the tasseled fringes of his tapestry, except where he has ripped them away.
He opens in Chelsea with standing silhouettes, male and female, and he interrupts their broader design for short loops of colored thread, much like Anni Albers. Albers, of course, was rescuing art and craft for Modernism, formalism, women, and the people, and Brackens, too, is asserting an eclectic heritage and essential dignity. Still, things are about to descend into indignity and violence. What is that couple holding anyway, and is it a weapon? Come to think of it, the weapon in the hands of the man about to slay a pig looks awfully feeble for the task. Still, there will be blood.
Nature gets its revenge soon enough, in the gallery’s Tribeca space. Men do crawl on the ground, and a dog has chased another man up a tree. It may, though, have done him a favor by bringing him closer to the sky. So does the space itself, a marbled hall that could easily upstage art, but instead complements it. If nothing else, it encourages one to linger, which does any art a favor. It also allows for still larger work—one topped with yellow butterflies that could almost float freely in the space of the room above one’s head, like a shining escape from bloodshed.
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