It’s funny, but listening to Signer sleep while watching Dedeaux-Norris struggle, I couldn’t help thinking about who gets license to take it easy and who has to work extra hard to be heard. “Schnarchen (Snoring)” (1992) features a tent and audio track of Signer snoring, alluding to a performance he did in Iceland. A potent metaphor for the effects of racism and sexism, the silent video evokes a visceral discomfort that for me was heightened by Roman Signer’s nearby installation. Dedeaux-Norris’s “Untitled (Say Her Name)” (2011-15), the artist, who uses they/them pronouns, tries to separate their lips, which are glued shut. Most artists here don’t show their work so much as point to the systems that determine its value. Beshty stipulates that the sculptures be handled without gloves, so traces of human labor accrue. Three prints by Ukeles representing work clocks hang near the entrance their direct conceptual descendants are Walead Beshty’s “Copper Surrogates” (2017-22), two wall-mounted L shapes that would be exemplars of minimalism if not for the fingerprints all over them. In this group show, curated by the artist Gabriela Vainsencher and 601Artspace’s director, Sara Shaoul, the contributors both follow and complicate that brief. “Show your work - show it again,” she wrote of the repetitive and often hidden nature of this type of labor. In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto for “maintenance art.” She proposed an exhibition spotlighting the tasks that go into the upkeep of everyday life, including cleaning and caring for others. Richmond-Edwards wrestles with all this inherited and hypothesized personal history and uses painting to meld them into a story of who she has come to be. There is also a figure of a canine meant to represent Anubis, a god who ushers humans into the afterlife. In this painting she presents two versions of herself, one that is obsidian and another that is brown. Then in “The Great Return” (2022), she visually wrestles with the possibility (suggested via a DNA test) that her ancestors may have been Indigenous American and not entirely, as she had assumed, African. In “Holy Wars” (2022) she rides a unicorn into battle alongside her tribe. In this show, “Currency,” the same urgency is present as Richmond-Edwards places herself in the role of the hero, though one who’s doubtful of her own provenance. When I first saw her work, I thought of mythmaking, how her depictions of familial characters, while flattened to almost the appearance of hieroglyphics (but with exuberant color schemes), become dynamic because they are infused with urgent narratives. I recently saw this Detroit-based artist’s work in the exhibition “ Legacies of the Great Migration,” which originated at Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, Miss., and is now at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Then there is Jamea Richmond-Edwards at Kravets Wehby. It’s now difficult to find artists that use the human figure to say something unique and unexpected. There is a glut of figurative drawing and painting that washed over the contemporary art scene in the past three to four years.
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