Caroline Kent: Saint Wilma and the 4th Dimension

CAROLINE KENT Saint Wilma and the 4th Dimension

Exhibition from January 31st-March 24th, 2013 Opening Reception: Thursday, January 31, 5-7pm Juxtaposition Arts Gallery 2007 Emerson Avenue N. Minneapolis, MN 55411

Black Madonna Front charcoal and acrylic paint on wood 4ft x 4ft

Black Madonna Back granulated rubber on wood 4ft x 4ft

States of Exception Saint Wilma and the 4th Dimension In 1960 African American sprinter Wilma Rudolf became the fastest woman on earth after clocking 11 seconds flat in the 100 metres final at the Rome Olympic games. This feat of physical and mental fortitude, viewed by an international audience of thousands, would change Rudolf ’s public persona for years to come. In the United States she came to be known as "The Tornado," whilst for the Italians she was La Gazzella Negra ("The Black Gazelle") and to the French, La Perle Noire ("The Black Pearl"). In the annals of sporting achievement, Rudolf ’s story is certainly not extraordinary, for like the many few who reach such lofty heights, she occupied the spotlight for a short number of years before it dimmed on her and illuminated another deserving talent. Consequently, it is intriguing that in recent years artist Caroline Kent has developed a fascination with Rudolf, leading to the new body of work on view in the exhibition Saint Wilma and the 4th Dimension. For Kent, the interest lies less in the athlete’s personal trajectory, but rather in the abstract space she came to occupy during her eleven seconds of glory. For the artist, as the seconds ticked away and the finish line drew close, Rudolf entered into a state of exception that would forever set her apart from us laymen. As the exhibition’s title and the use of iconography in the work suggest Kent audaciously infers that Wilma was propelled into an extraterrestrial sphere akin to the spaces reserved in our imaginations for saints and other venerated individuals in traditional belief systems and popular culture.

A two-ness of spaces that persist despite time image transfer and collage on paper 25 x 20 inches

Two Wilmas collage and ink jet print on archival paper 17 x 22 inches

Hypercube wood, plaster and image transfer 3 ft x 2 ft x 1.5ft

Kent’s desire to unpack Rudolf ’s metamorphosis goes well beyond making a study of the tangible measures that we use to calculate and categorise (super) human ability. It looks outside the “faster, higher, stronger” dictum of the Olympic Games, and instead speaks about the intangible forces that render individual and/or collective actions and experiences beyond human comprehension and perception. Most significantly, by appropriating historical images of the Olympian’s famed dash, Kent points to the issue of how myths and legends are formed across epochs. Wilma thus simultaneously becomes a cipher for transcendence – whether spiritual, intellectual or physical – and the construction of fictionalised others through rhetoric.

Broaching this process, Kent proceeds to represent the site of Wilma’s transcendence – the track. Across the works on view, it appears in deconstructed fragments that do not make up a cohesive whole. This underlines the fact that however concrete the events that occur on its ground appear, there is always embedded a sense of the unquantifiable. Of course this extends to all aspects of daily life, which as we know feeds off the interplay between the tangible and intangible. If the track represents a traversal from the known into the unknown, then Kent’s sketched overlays of abstract cubic forms indicate a search to understand that which lies outside of our knowledge base. The use of these forms is not inconsequential for it actually relates to the tesseract – a four dimensional geometric projection that offers an extension of our three dimensional reality. The notion that there is a fourth unnamed dimension of human experience is much theorised and contested across the sciences and theology, nevertheless, Kent’s conflation of a pseudo analytic frame with figurative articulations of the track underscores the continued failure of language to rationalize the nameless.

Elsewhere, Kent curiously dislodges the materiality of her drawing surface and canvases. This technique starts innocently enough with the artist embellishing graphite drawings with glitter. Here there is a one to one correlation with techniques used in iconographic painting to further articulate the otherworldliness of their subjects. Extending the question artifice and spectacle, Kent uses the granulated rubber texture of real tracks as a medium, setting up a conversation between its spatial representation and materiality. Kent extends the metaphor of moving from one dimension into another by literally treating her canvases as malleable matter, sculpting polygonal shapes and circles into them. Here, she daringly crosses the formal boundaries of the painted surface, immediately transforming how we may interact with the work. This calls for the viewer to look past the surface treatment and painterly artifice in order to contemplate the vastness of the void. This opens up a contemplative space whose confounding articulation mimics the experience of transcending space, matter and cogent worlds.

The metaphor of mirroring that pervades the work cannot go unnoticed for it points to the crux of Kent’s interest in Rudolf. As much as Saint Wilma and the 4th Dimension is about spaces and processes of veneration, it also harbours a deep inquiry into the performing of identity and race. Given the content and context of the work, it would be remise to discuss this without remarking on the famed image of the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute that proceeded Rudolf ’s triumph. Although this event remains a beacon of political resistance in our popular consciousness, Rudolf ’s presence on the global stage during an era of deep civil unrest in 1960s America carries a comparable poignancy. We can therefore suggest that Kent’s work recuperates Wilma’s status as a highly politicised individual who was a symbol of black achievement, resilience and victory during a period of immense struggle.

Determined outcomes predicated by intuitive straining towards the line image transfer and collage on archival paper 25 x 20 inches

The baton switches hands across a milleu mixed media on wood panel 16 x 20 inches

Her era was one where W.E.B Du Bois’ conception of “double consciousness” weighed heavy, where in spite of her achievements; she could not be emancipated from being named and defined by the gaze of the white other. Kent points to this fractured identity through doubling, reversing and repeating the image of Wilma’s body stretching across the finish line - rendering her identity unstable, multifaceted and contingent on external factors. This is further underscored by the insertion of language in the painting Black Madonna. In the abstract translations from “black madonna” to “black pearl” to “black hole” the racial signifier remains constant, yet it moves from describing an object of reverence, to one of desire and finally to nothingness. This play with language hints at Kent’s attempt to overcome and erase the meanings projected onto the label ‘black’. In our contemporary era of ‘post blackness,’ where the term is seemingly plastic and supposedly exists without the burden of difference, this work is a sobering reminder of the continued pervasiveness of skewed identification. Therefore the works on view in the show must be understood as exploring the possibilities of surpassing racial categories and their limitations, to relegate these to the unforgiving barrenness of the black hole as it were, from which they cannot escape. In doing so, Kent’s work ultimately explores the unwavering promise of being an exception beyond all social prejudice and qualifiers. Of course this in itself is a fiction that has yet to be made a reality – it is the fourth dimension of the contemporary American experience. Ó Yesomi Umolu 2013

Bios Caroline Kent lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. She has been included in multiple exhibitions including: The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN), Minneapolis College of Art & Design (Minneapolis, MN), SUNY Dutchess(Poughkeepsie, NY),and the California African American Museum ( Los Angeles, CA). She is a recipient of the Creative City Making grant 2013, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant in 2011, and a 2009-10 Jerome Fellow. Kent is the co-founder of The Bindery Projects, an artist run exhibition space that seeks to be a catalyst for pragmatic critical thought and conversation. Kent teaches Drawing and Painting at Juxtaposition Arts, a non-profit organization that fosters artistic expression and entrepreneurial endeavors for young people. www.carolinekent.com Yesomi Umolu is a curator and writer. She is currently Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis where she is curating the upcoming exhibition The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal. Recent projects include AGM 10: Collectivus CPS, Manifesta 8 (2010); John Smith Solo Show, Royal College of Art, London (2010); Performing Localities, Iniva, London (2009) and Contested Ground, Project Space 176, London (2009). Yesomi has contributed to seminars and conferences at a number of international universities including Goldsmiths University and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her writing has been published in PARADE: Public modes of assembly and forms of address, Curating the European University: Exposition and Public Debate, and art&education papers. Yesomi holds an MA (with distinction) in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. www.yesomiumolu.com Juxtaposition Arts is an urban arts organization located in North Minneapolis, MN. In addition to being a youth education program they have a teen staffed art and design enterprise and an exhibition space. www.juxtaposition.org All images courtesy the artist.

Juxtaposition Arts 2007 Emerson Avenue North Minneapolis, MN 55411(612) 588-1148 Gallery Hours M-R, 10-4pm www.juxtaposition.org