Arnold J. Kemp’s Works Revolve Around Masks in Chicago Show – RisePEI

Over 15 years in the past, Chicago-based artist Arnold J. Kemp purchased a rubber masks bearing Fred Flintstone’s face from a avenue vendor in downtown New York on Halloween night time. Years later, Kemp would rediscover the masks in his studio, and it will definitely grew to become a fixture in his creative apply. His 2016 sculpture Headless reveals the cartoon character’s hole head—lazy-eyed and bulbous-faced—painted silver and mounted on a steel stake. “I have a tendency to gather issues and I simply have a sense I’ll use them someday in a piece,” he mentioned.

For the reason that ’90s, Kemp has been fixated on masks and different modes of disguise, tapping into a way that “masking up can in truth be rather more revealing than supposed,” mentioned Dieter Roelstraete, the curator of Kemp’s present exhibition on the Neubauer Collegium for Tradition and Society on the College of Chicago.

Kemp’s apply has lengthy explored themes round id, stereotypes, and common concepts of “sameness,” all fueled by the disparate objects he has collected from numerous locations he’s lived—San Francisco, Oregon, New York, Richmond, and Chicago, the place he moved in 2016 to grow to be dean of graduate research on the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago.

An exhibition in 2021 at JOAN gallery in Los Angeles, titled “False Hydras,” drew on a collection of encounters by which he’d been mistaken for one more author with whom he shares a reputation. For the venture, Kemp collected copies of the opposite Arnold Kemp’s 1972 tome Eat of Me, I Am the Savior, which tells the story of a younger Black revolutionary, and positioned them indiscriminately into crevices of a glossy midcentury chair. For a collection made within the early 2000s, he photographed himself donning a mock Ku Klux Klan hood comprised of material styled after West African textiles.

“We’re at all times shifting in an out of masks. Individuals name it code-switching now,” Kemp advised ARTnews in an interview, including that his works interrogate collective shifts of “individuals trying alike, performing alike, and a really explicit male style of that type of cloning.” With supplies usually coming to him by likelihood encounters, Kemp says it begs the query of whether or not the archetypes he explores are “discovered or created and cultivated.”

In “Much less Like an Object and Extra Just like the Climate,” on view by April 10, the Flintstone masks reappears, seen in two large-scale images from the 2019 collection “Humorous Home (Speech Acts)” which can be mounted reverse one another on the gallery’s entryway. On the other facet of the dark-wood-paneled room sits a meticulous assortment of 500 individually sculpted ceramic masks, neatly organized on a makeshift stage that spans practically 20 toes and rises only a few inches off the bottom.

Within the pair of images, the age-weathered Flintstone masks folds over Kemp’s personal balled fist, forming a ghoulish expression. Right here, as with earlier work, Kemp makes use of this object as a proxy to discover bigger tropes of a bygone period. Fred Flintstone, who made his debut on ABC in 1960, is a part of a protracted line of male comedic personas with a chauvinistic flare—first popularized in Jackie Gleason together with his two reveals within the ’50s and passing on to the likes of Archie Bunker in All within the Household, George Jetson, and Homer Simpson. Kemp describes because the archetype because the “bigoted on a regular basis man that we’re presupposed to assume is humorous.” However, Kemp warned, he “may be very harmful.”

For Kemp, the masks in every {photograph} represents a hindrance to speech by blocking its handler’s capacity to verbalize one thing troubling. “The hand is just not passively carrying the masks,” he mentioned. “It’s really shifting it, prefer it’s attempting to talk by it or it’s attempting to say one thing that’s troublesome. There’s a lack of language, and it virtually finally ends up like a form of an indication language.”

Pairing the masks together with his personal Black hand, Kemp mentioned, is a approach to upend expectations the viewer could have of the varied “personages that the Black artist might inhabit.”

“A few of its energy certainly derives from the marginally stoic, restrained temper of the work’s presence within the gallery,” Roelstraete mentioned. He and Kemp labored collectively for a number of months to compose the exhibition, which takes a minimal structure, with images propped towards partitions and close-to-the-ground ground installations, in an general ornate area.

“I needed to have interaction the ground area of the gallery,” Kemp mentioned. “What may be held on the partitions of the area could be very restricted. The pictures have at all times had a sculptural really feel for me.”

Throughout the room, the place the present’s different focus sits, is a set of handmade ceramics that Kemp produced within the fashion of domino masks, which solely cowl the eyes. The set up, titled Wanting on the Solar (2021), reveals shiny variations of those face coverings, every made coarse by Kemp’s finger imprints and painted in various cool-toned hues—purple, blue, inexperienced.

For Kemp, the ceramic masks give the impact of a personified physique, making the viewer really feel as in the event that they’re being watched.

“There are all of those eyes within the exhibition which can be really trying on the viewer,” Kemp mentioned. “You’re probably not certain what you’re taking a look at, you see the stage and also you see the colours, however it doesn’t come into focus actually till you’re virtually proper on prime of it.”

“Much less Like an Object and Extra Just like the Climate” takes its title from one thing the composer John Cage mentioned when requested to explain his longtime collaboration with the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage in contrast their creative partnership and its fluid nature to the climate, explaining, “It’s much less like an object and extra just like the climate as a result of in an object, you possibly can inform the place the boundaries are, however within the climate it’s unattainable to say when one thing begins or ends.” Kemp mentioned his present is impressed by that high quality of boundlessness that Cage mentioned.

Kemp’s curiosity in masks, or something that may cowl one’s face, lengthy predates the pandemic, and Covid-related masking wasn’t on Kemp’s thoughts within the making of this exhibition. Roelstraete, nonetheless, sees some correlations.

“Wanting on the ceramic ‘masks,’ you might be in a roundabout way reminded of masking’s many conflicting meanings,” he mentioned. “You might be tempted to start out excited about the dialectic of trying and being checked out, and the way a lot of the human affront of two years’ price of Covid-driven restraints and restrictions could have one thing to do with the truth that we are able to’t fairly see or learn one another like we used to.”

There are only some works on view within the present, and Kemp mentioned that, in true Cage-like vogue, a customer finally ends up turning into a part of the set up: “It wants the viewer to finish the that means,” he mentioned.