Christopher Blay: Ritual SpLaVCe at the Galveston Arts Center, January 13 – April 21, 2024 

Christopher Blay’s Ritual SpLaVCe at the Galveston Arts Center offers a journey into the intersections of history, mythology, and speculative fiction. Drawing from his heritage as well as contemporary cultural narratives, Blay crafts an immersive experience that challenges viewers to reevaluate their understanding of identity and human values.

Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors are immediately drawn to a striking, human-sized sculpture of the astronaut/slave, rendered with meticulous detail using hair combs. This recurrent motif, reminiscent of Simon Vega’s exploration of colonialism in space, serves as a powerful symbol of the interplay between past and future, oppression and liberation. 

Throughout the gallery, viewers encounter a diverse array of sculptures, paintings, and prints, each bearing the imprint of Blay’s conceptual vision. Wicker and reed structures evoke the imagery of space vessels and ancestral rituals, inviting contemplation on the interconnectedness of human experience across time and space.

Blay’s exploration of figuration prompts viewers to consider their own perspective in relation to the artwork. Are we foreign observers, detached from the cultural context of the artist’s heritage? Or are we domestic participants, actively engaging with the symbolism and iconography embedded within each piece? These questions linger in the air, challenging us to confront our biases and preconceptions.

At the heart of Ritual SpLaVCe lies a profound meditation on the human condition and the values that shape our collective consciousness. By reimagining the historical narrative of the SpLaVCe Ship — a vessel that merges the trajectories of space exploration and slavery — Blay invites us to reflect on the legacies of the past and the possibilities of a Black future.

In dialogue with Kru and Grebo African cosmologies, Blay’s work transcends the boundaries of time and culture, weaving together threads of ancestral wisdom and speculative imagination. Through his artistry, he creates a space for contemplation and stillness, where viewers are invited to embark on a journey of self-discovery and cultural exploration.

Masha Sha: SO WHAT at the Galveston Artist Residency, March 2 – April 27, 2024 

Through her meticulous process, Masha Sha breathes life into graphite on tracing paper, crafting large-scale drawings that beckon viewers into her fastidious rendering of poetry, lifted from other texts and her intuited experience of the world. These pieces are amplifying words into graphic forms. Their physical shapes become more than graphemes, or the smallest unit of any writing system (more simply referred to as “letters”). Here, Sha’s sentences evoke thoughts that can contain multitudes of emotion.

Drawing inspiration from various points of literature, such as Samuel Beckett’s poem “Neither,” Sha delves into the art of automatic writing, allowing the gestalt of her markings to guide her towards evocative word forms. The resulting pieces are a testament to the artist’s ability to navigate the intricate relationship between language and visual representation.

As one navigates the gallery space, each artwork reveals itself as a tapestry of shimmering graphite, exuding an almost ethereal quality. Sha’s work is imbued with a sense of duality, where strokes oscillate between fluidity and rigidity, mirroring the complexities of human experience. Some marks dance across the paper with the whimsy of the wind, while others stand stoically, imbued with a sense of permanence.

Delving deeper into the layers of meaning embedded within Sha’s artwork, one is reminded of Mairead Small Staid’s musings on the trading city of Euphemia, as described in her book of essays, The Traces. Aside from goods, the city’s merchants trade stories. Small Staid describes the fleeting, absent quality of what a city is like in your mind, delivered there not by experience but through oration. I see this quality in Sha’s work here: paper pages carrying words from other works.

In her exploration of the eternal struggle against the relentless passage of time, Sha poses thought-provoking questions that linger long after one has left the gallery space: How does one withstand the ceaseless onslaught of time’s unyielding tide? What does it mean to exist at the intersection of the immediate and the infinite?

Through her work, Sha uses daydreaming and diffuse concentration to intuit the power of words, which she recasts from their original authors into guiding beacons amidst the chaos of existence. The words in these drawings are laborious, and take longer to draw than they would to write on the pages of a notebook. In a world fraught with perpetual motion, Sha’s Unspeakable Home is a sanctuary for the soul, inviting viewers to find solace in the beauty of the ephemeral and the transient.

 

William Sarradet is the Assistant Editor of Glasstire.