Work
Books
- Pla(y)in Euphemisms
Experiences
Writing
Bio
In a land seeded in photography’s milieu, lays a display that turns this history on its head. Panning over white columns and marble floors, Scene at Eastman greets the audience with a collaboration between Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Phil Taylor in the George Eastman Museum. Opening on October 25th 2024, this photographic journey displayed original and appropriated imagery supported by aluminum, glass, concrete, paper and tin.
White Walls, White Floor, White Room. Upon entering this monoculture, the grand image of Shirley Temple ruptures, wafting nostalgia and dark matter. Centered in the gallery within a glass case a sign reads, “The attendant will be happy to assist you”, but when you look at the door only your reflection and a dark corner awaits.
Upon entering this alternative mode, you are diminished into the background as these images watch the shift of obsidian that enters their realm. As you search for a notion of belonging within the all black room, power is called into question: ‘Why have I been ushered into darkness?’ and conversely, ‘Do these entities call for this unveiling?’ As your eye fights the dim light, a flat stone-like idol reads, “Church of the Sanctified Brethren” while your old friend Shirley Temple flutters through a small opening, connecting these two worlds.
Temple’s omnipresence arrives at the precipice of performance where the idol addresses the audience, except for her and Wolokau-Wanambwa there is no end. Clad in a lustrous white suit, Temple tips her hat forward in a beacon of focused light. Unlike the encircling blackface, nothing shields her likeness from artifice and agenda. In the 1934 sourced film, “Stand Up and Cheer”, Shirley Jane Temple stands in the spotlight as a girl in a world post D.W. Griffith’s Birth of Nation, World War I and the ‘female ingenue’. Locked within a stage, Temple mangles codes of our social imaginary by crossing racial lines for entertainment’s sake, pushing the seams of public and private. Temple becomes the conceptual infinite which only the camera can bestow, a portal of light and darkness that inhabits both rooms no matter the physical distance.
In Scene at Eastman Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa utilizes the capacity of surface from its sensorial environment to the treatment of each image. Our comprehension of surfaces is codified through language, ideologies and generational relationships which in his all white deprivation room positions the viewers at ground zero. A familiarity with the ‘white wall’ grounds this space but lapses begin and the expected becomes grim. The pictured white man’s gaze following your every move weighs heavily after Shirley Temple – which could be ordered ‘virgin’ or ‘dirty’ at your local bar– beams in a sea of blackface. When looking into these images you believe a chosen understanding of what it is to be in that photo and this transmutation is where the appropriated, original and mental imagery fuse. This play within the soot of the expectation, calls into question if we can ever know the distance between comprehension and reduction.
he strong feelings when entering this space seem irrational because it is two rooms with standard wall-mounted images and off-wall plinths yet, there is this oppressive embodied rigidity. Now, one can do a light skim of this show and reduce it to race-relations through the use of black and white imagery, black and white viewing spaces and its display of society's racist, bigoted and patriarchal past (and present). However, race is a construct and so is this gallery. So is every image and object. So is your existence. This is a noted contention that Wolukau-Wanambwa and Taylor nurture to a fever pitch. This black and white image-laden grid mirrors the systems our world propagates – that darkness that flew around you was the question, “What will I do to break out of this?” Rather than asking what can be seen you are forced to realize how much you have overlooked within this gallery and the everyday.
Scene at Eastman scaffolds photographic history’s crux – a ‘place’ in which the practice analyzes itself. Not only is visual representation questioned but how the apparatus allows for images to speak to one another. Images have been relegated to monographic sets, but within Scene at Eastman the happenstance that images share a second in place and visibility is exacerbated by the exhibition’s shifting sequence: the viewer does not come to see a cemented body of work but arrives for an experience.
Within the white room, visible surveillance cameras beam down but what about every other room and courtyard? By the 1970’s George Eastman’s Kodak controlled over 90% of the film sales in the United States, employed over 60,000 locals and had residential neighborhoods in Rochester. In Kodak Park, racial covenants barred Black, Brown, Jewish, Italian and Polish people from owning property creating the economic landscape that lacerates this city. Now, this history of Eastman cannot be divorced from the aesthetics in his eponymous institution. Before you experience Scene at Eastman, Wolukau-Wanambwa has you enter Eastman’s land, open his doors and walk the gridded path to the back corner — another image. Wolukau-Wanambwa balances fractals of place upon the narrative line of Eastman’s architecture. He reflexively critiques, as you stand within the spotlight of Shirley Temple’s surface through the one way window or up close.
Wolukau-Wanambwa questions our pedagogy of seeing. Through life we are taught how to make sense of the world through simple derivations of scale, tone, contrast and compositional relations. This system is not relegated to the arts but funnels into every street corner, personal relationship, and family dynamic. By untethering the image from chronological time the journey from sight to comprehension is studied. Within this exhibition no context is given, allowing Wolukau-Wanambwa to uncover our schema through surveillance. A slight shift of weight from one leg to another or the gaze of secretly watching another all amounts to an environment where the interstices of cognition electrify the photographic work.