March 5 - May 2, 2020
In participation with Fotofest Biennial 2020, Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art is pleased to present Flash of the Spirit by New York based artist Lyle Ashton Harris. In nearly three decades of his career, Harris has cultivated various media ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance. He appropriately explores intersections between the personal and the political, creating a body of work that generates discourse on gender, ethnicity, and desire of the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Today, his dramatic, carnival-esque, and sometimes erotic photographs render themselves as manifestations of his life-long journey towards “mastering the true self.” Known for explicitly employing various masquerades throughout his practice, Harris now alludes to an Afrofuturistic aesthetic that commands deeper exploration into the hybrid intersectionality of history, race, gender, sexuality, mythology and memory.
Flash of the Spirit parades mid-to-large scale cinematic photographs taken in lush, bucolic natural environments. Lyle Ashton Harris returns to the mode of self-portraiture, performing as an enigmatic masked figure night trekking at a distance, resting against a tree trunk, playfully crouching behind red, translucent plastic or mirroring over a still body of water. The plurality of West African masks borrowed from his uncle, Harold Epps, to some extent endorses the multiple selves he intends to express. In Zamble (Clermont) 2018 for instance, Harris projects boldly as he wears a Guro Zamble mask that represents a supernatural akin to the antelope beloved for its grace and speed. The masks represent defiant symbols of endangered cultural legacies while signifying the connection between spirits to the realm of the living. Hence, it becomes clear—through this body of work—that these protective avatars of forces operate in photographic staging as it motivates the many, uninhibited dances of complex gestures, leaving the viewers in deep conversation with Lyle Ashton Harris’s mythopoetic portraits.
Lyle Ashton Harris was born in The Bronx, New York in 1965 and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his BA from Wesleyan University, his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including most recently at LUMA Arles, France; the Cinéma Du Réel, 40th Edition, presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2016 São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the 52nd Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy, among others. His work is represented in permanent collections including The Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Harris received a 2016 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among other awards and honors. He currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor of Art at New York University.
Opening: March 5, 2020 | 6–8 pm
Artist talk: March 6, 2020 | 12–1 pm
3465 B West Alabama
Houston, 77027 Texas
832–740-4288
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