(Los Angeles, CA) — UNREPD is pleased to present home/body, Corey Pemberton’s debut West Coast solo exhibition. Featuring mixed media works on canvas, home/body considers “the ordinary” as an embodied experience. The exhibition begins from the premise that, in Pemberton’s words, “to feel ordinary is a luxury.” In this series of portraits, Pemberton extends that luxury to people in his life whose bodies and identities fall outside of the traditional raced, gendered, and sexualized boundaries of ordinariness.
Pemberton anchors his portraits within the domestic, as his subjects’ homes allow space to rest, to lounge, to contemplate, to be free. These seemingly quotidian tableaus are at once light and approachable, and yet suggest the high stakes involved in claiming space for oneself as a member of a historically oppressed group. In challenging prevailing notions about blackness, queerness, and womanhood, Pemberton’s works redefine the boundaries of the everyday. Using acrylic paint, photography, textile, and glass, Pemberton assembles domestic spaces in which accordingly diverse people are centered and enjoy safety, love, and wholeness.
Rendered in vibrant color, layered pattern, and rich texture, the scenes depicted give insight into the humanness of their subjects. Through exquisite attention to objects that provide a feeling of home, Pemberton invites viewers into intimate moments that reveal his subjects’ private selves. Encountered on their own turf and terms, Pemberton’s figures resist easy categorization according to bias or stereotype. Where one might expect strength, they find softness; where one assumes superficiality, they find depth. In bodily gesture or clothing thrown over a chair, books on a nightstand or art on the walls, the viewer is invited to know these subjects and, in so knowing, to see that their comfort, their solitude, their joy, their yearning, is not so different than one’s own. In these moments lie the possibility of transformation that powers Pemberton’s work—a hopefulness that, like the work itself, is anything but ordinary.
Corey Pemberton (b. Reston, VA 1990, lives Los Angeles) received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. He has completed residencies at The Pittsburgh Glass Center (PA), Bruket (Bodø, NO), as well as a Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts (NC). He is the cofounder and director of Crafting the Future, a non-profit with a goal of increasing BIPOC access to the fields of art, craft, and design. His work has been shown across the United States, including solo exhibitions: creature, comfort at Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC, in 2020; and Finding Home in Otherness at Blue Spiral 1, Asheville, NC, in 2019. He was the recipient of the Excellence in Glass award from the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016.
UNREPD is pleased to announce Like Watermelon for Chocolate, a solo presentation by artist Kirk Henriques, featuring a selection of abstract and figurative paintings in oil and acrylic on fiberglass mesh. Opening on Juneteenth, or Black Independence Day, a holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States, the exhibition will be on view through July 20, 2022.
At the center of this body of work is the watermelon, an icon ripe with socio-economic significance. The exhibition considers watermelon’s fraught history as a symbol of freedom and prosperity, as well as denigration and shame, for black people in America. After the Civil War, black people grew and sold watermelon as a way to support themselves in their newly-established independence. Because their success was threatening to the Southern social order, white people quickly stigmatized watermelon as a symbol of black laziness, uncleanliness, and childishness; this stigma persists through present day. In his paintings, Henriques seeks to reclaim the watermelon as an uplifting symbol of black independence across various contexts. Like Watermelon for Chocolate, then, is a meditation on the possibilities of freedom for black people.
Inspired by Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate, the exhibition situates watermelon in a familial framework. In mining the depths of emotion based in personal spaces and experiences, the exhibition begins to take the shape of a black American telenovela. Dramatic and poignant, Henriques’s paintings incorporate movement both literally and figuratively, leading viewers through the amalgam of signification within each piece; the paintings’ layered surfaces repeat materially the histories they represent. Henriques’s formal interests therefore echo his narrative and, despite their historical bases, concern themselves with futurity. The exhibition tells the story of an abstract idea of American life, one in which black independence is a self-evident truth. If we begin from a place of black freedom, the paintings posit, “American life” begins to look like black joy, black love, and black peace. That is to say that if black independence is the soil, the fruit it grows tastes as sweet as watermelon.
UNREPD is pleased to announce Edwin Marcelin’s debut solo exhibition, Elevation: Abstract Meditations on Iconic Black Discipline. The exhibition highlights Marcelin’s commitment to the centrality of abstraction in the making of black iconography, language, and being. Presented in two parts, a series of paintings and a video installation created 20 years apart from one another, the exhibition insists on the usefulness of abstraction and the possibility of catharsis for black people.
In 15 oil paintings on canvas, Marcelin deconstructs an icon known to many as Black Jesus. The paintings make manifest the necessity of abstraction in the creation of an icon; for a black man to become Jesus, he must be more than human. He must be an all-encompassing combination of “good,” including: image, value, integrity, consistency, and love; he must possess a level of discipline beyond what is thought to be humanly possible. This series of paintings therefore offer a vision of abstraction from humanity that is very different than the dehumanization often discussed with regard to blackness.
At once familiar and foreign, the paintings foreground the interactivity of black iconography,
based in both memory and perception. The paintings lead viewers to mine decades-old feelings; in projecting that affect onto the paintings, the images become more than shape and color. Viewing the paintings, then, is a spiritual experience in which one meets their former self in a moment of pure joy, admiration, and wonder. Each painting is a suggestion; each image is self-consciously a combination of paint and memory.
Likewise, the installation immerses viewers in a shared experience. Entitled The Only Nigga in the Room, it is an interactive self-portrait of the artist in a place of his choosing. In order to exist in that space with confidence and the intention to participate, the installation contends, a specific type of discipline and endurance are needed. Through repetition, expected issues are layered and collapsed while fatigue, resilience, form, and etiquette take center stage. In this way, the installation offers an inward look at a common experience.
The installation is at once a meditation on being and language, on pressure and self-awareness, on effect and affect, on circularity and attrition. Its rhythmic performance requires patience and hope; it asks: can we push a word out of the body and into conversation in a way that is broadly peaceful and even helpful? Using repetition, the installation leads viewers to explore what happens if we abstract from what we think we know, if we disconnect from real life usage and visage, if we say the thing that cannot be said, if we follow the sound.
Together, the works offer new ways of thinking about black abstraction and humanity. Particularly for people who are always already abstracted from their humanity, bearing witness to the beauty and sacredness of the works’ controlled scatterings is a powerful experience. If one can find strength, value, and grace in the space beyond humanity, the exhibition is not only a catharsis, but a guide.