黑料不打烊

David Castillo presents In these shadows, an exhibition of Lyle Ashton Harris鈥檚 unique 鈥渟hadow鈥� dye sublimation works which situate photographs from the artist鈥檚 vast archive within richly textured assemblages. This body of work was first presented with David Castillo at Art Basel in 2017. This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of this body of work in the United States. The works are all new, made within the last months. Harris鈥檚 Shadow Works are seeded from a prodigious personal archive of thousands of images (color and black-and-white photographs as well as prints from 35mm Ektachrome slides), including family snapshots, handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, artwork reproductions鈥攁ll shot and compiled by the artist over four decades. 

These collective works document a portrait of the artist through the traces of his prolific artistic practice. At times pictured within his work and at times not, Harris locates himself within this history through the faces of the subjects captured in these scenes and the locales he found himself, spanning the awakening of his sexuality, youthful romantic obsessions, his earliest photographic practice, and moments shared with friends, lovers, activists, and members of the wider LGBTQ community in a range of intimate and public settings. 

The artist combines images, personal ephemera, documents and mementos into dense wall collages in his studio, and variously overlays these groupings with colored gels and letters stenciled in paint, constellating forms and juxtaposing images in renewed and overlapping contexts that bring at times disparate threads from throughout the artist鈥檚 life and career into contact. These ephemeral collages are then photographed, serving to document the new frames of reference into which each element has been cast. Residual in nature, the resulting photographic compositions evoke the fleeting shadows of memory traces and serve as the centerpieces of these Shadow Works, living memorials that conjure the artist鈥檚 rich, complex life and the intersectional histories that inform his practice. 

In their formal elements, these works can be seen as abstract personifications of Harris himself. Each piece is fitted within a frame lined in vibrantly printed and woven textiles鈥攑atterned with traditional West African motifs鈥攖hat the artist acquired when he lived in Ghana intermittently from 2005 to 2012. Many of these fabrics were gifted to Harris, others purchased, but each is situated within transatlantic histories that fuse personal, cultural, and political circumstances. The piece Succession (2020) is inset with a shard of pottery, Yamantaka (2020) with seashells, and Double Gasper (2020) and Kennedy Crash #2 (2020) include dreadlocks cut from Harris鈥檚 own head. Challenging viewers to mine their profuse subject matter and explore the narrative clues visually woven into each piece, these assemblages evince a distinct treatment of the past filtered through the artist himself and his role as both the subject and catalyst of his body of work. 

Accompanying In these shadows is the first presentation of Dawnscape (2010) in the United States. Dawnscape is a meditative, 23-minute video study of the breaking dawn through the artist鈥檚 window. Shot while Harris lived in Ghana, and corresponding with the period when the artist first began collecting the fabrics that comprise his Shadow Works, the video captures a real-time scene of flickering lights, electrical wires and trees swaying in the wind during an early morning storm. The work offers an expressive and melancholy context which situates Harris鈥檚 work within this personal geography. 

In these shadows is presented at David Castillo concurrently with Lyle Ashton Harris: Ektachrome Archive, an exhibition of the artist鈥檚 documentary photographs and journals at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which runs from September 23, 2020 through May 31, 2021. The Ektachrome works were first exhibited at David Castillo in 2015 after being a stored archive for decades. The Ektachrome Archive would go on to be exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Sao Paulo Biennial among numerous other venues. Lyle Ashton Harris: Ektachrome Archive is the first project in a new initiative by ICA Miami inviting artists to engage in dialogue with Robert Gober鈥檚 Untitled (1994鈥�95), on long-term view on the museum鈥檚 ground floor. Lyle Ashton Harris: Ektachrome Archive is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Gean Moreno.