For OasaDuVerney’s first solo exhibition Welancola Gallery In Brooklyn, “The world to live in“She makes the graphite painting act as both a warning and a promise. The 43-year-old artist, born to Trinidad’s parents in Queens, Relentless supporters To cherish and protect the lives of black people. As she explains on the gallery’s website, “The figures in these works are portrayed with the care, compassion, and understanding that they deserve a blackbody but are not always given.”
The term “blackbody” she uses brings me back to the discussion I had with curators and writers about whether this metaphor is appropriate and does the work we envision.Despite its widespread usage, it strikes me as dehumanizing when discussing experiences that affect black. Man, The whole human being. Still, what DuVerney does in her work on display (nine large graphite drawings, sometimes decorated with colorful acrylic paints) completely humanizes her subject. And she incorporates her skin into the game in her urban and home environment, modeled on her own children, her friends, and her neighbors.
Her son, Stokely DuVerney Beavers, is a “growing veil” (all works) behind a wire mesh lavishly decorated with various orchids (hellebolin, coral roots, dragon’s mouth, female slippers, snake’s mouth). Is drawn from 2022). — All in fuchsia, canary yellow, cardinal red and deep magenta tones. Against her depiction of the fence and her son’s face in monochromatic graphite, this work shows how sometimes a hostile world sees this young black man (in clear black and white words). Suggests how he sees him. A living and growing color. Throughout the show she keeps her promise.
There are two portraits of her daughter. In the first piece, titled “Black Power Wave: Nightwatch,” Nzinga DuVerney appears to be sleeping, her long braids hang on her pillow, and her body is depressed in her bedding. .. Rising from the bottom of her composition and muscularly curling towards her torso is a dark, graphite, gently reflecting waveform. The artist began making what she calls “Black Power Wave” in 2016, which are characteristic of her work. Waves saturated with graphite and cut and shaped to suggest an irregular surface of choppy water can look terrible and can be read as a threat. But in her second portrait, “Black Power Wave: Weaving Helleborine,” her daughter faces the image of her twins, weaving orchids in her hair. The waveform appears as a kind of decorative trellis that supports both figures.
Duberney previously exhibited Black Power Wave National Museum of Women, In Washington DC Brooklyn BRIC,Currently Brattleboro Museum and Art Center In Vermont. Waves serve at several levels, including as a visual metaphor of community-based collective black political and social power, which is considered a force of nature. But aesthetically, the waves are more illusionary. In the medium-sized graphite drawing “Join What, Die For Who?”, The waves transformed into a set of fragmented rattlesnakes. This is a coat of arms image of a warrior band. In Madonna with Child, the waves protectively surround the figure of a casually dressed black woman holding a sleeping baby, acting as a kind of decorative border or baroque frame.
For Duberney, the world recreated by the power of this fascinating element is where she wants to be. She means that this wave will push all viewers to the shores of her paradise, Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where her people live.
Oasa DuVerney: The world you live in
Until August 6th, Welancora Gallery, 33 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, 917-848-4627; welancoragallery.com
