Steffani Jemison: Plant You Now, Dig You Later

Steffani Jemison

Plant You Now, Dig You Later

Plant You Now, Dig You Later

by Susan Cross

The title of Steffani Jemison’s exhibition — inspired by the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s adaptation of the vernacular phrase meaning “see you soon”— conveys the artist’s interests in the complicated role of language and literacy in black history. It also points to the potential for language to dismantle the traditional power structures it has built. Jemison’s works engage a number of codes and alternative systems of communication, including music, to grapple with ideas about education, access, faith, utopia, and progress. Many of her works are rooted specifically in black culture and investigate interiority as a form of resistance. Influenced by the Martiniqueborn poet Édouard Glissant and his postcolonial theories on opacity, Jemison embraces ambiguity and intuition in her work, using them as tools for reframing the world as a relation of differences and multiplicities instead of oppositions and hierarchies.

For Jemison, Armstrong’s playful formulation, “And now I’ll do you, Just like the Farmer did the Potato — I'll Plant you Now and Dig you Later” (which also inspired the title of a text work on view) not only articulates the wonderful plasticity of language, but also makes connections between literacy and the land — a recurring theme in Jemison’s practice. It also importantly implies a return, a relationship to the past and its connection to the present and future.

Jemison’s research-based practice often makes its own return to the archive. She engages unresolved historical moments — often at the precipice of change — for untapped potential in what has been “planted” there, cultivating what might be produced or imagined for the future.

The core of the exhibition is a sound work composed with Solresol — an artificial language developed by the French composer François Sudre in the early 19th century. Based on the seven notes of the octave and the seven colors of the rainbow, the utopian language was meant to be universal. Each word is constructed from an arrangement of one or more of the notes — or syllables — of the solfège system (i.e. do re mi fa sol la ti). Through a mix of

voice, cello, and digital percussion and keyboard, Jemison’s Recitatif (What if we need new words?) presents Solresol translations of a number of seemingly unrelated texts. Recitatif references the title of a short story by Toni Morrison, while playing on the term “recitative”— a musical style that adapts vocal rhythms to ordinary speech. The first section of Recitatif includes scales, the introduction of the Solresol “alphabet.” The second features a selection of single words and their antonyms — including “power,” “freedom,” “glass,” and “rise.” In Solresol, the notes that make up any given word can be played or sung in reverse to articulate its antonym.

So, in Jemison’s work, the performers sing the notes which denote the word “power” -do-mi-sol-re — and then sing “the opposite of power,” -re-sol-mi-do.

The system is intentionally simple, but it is also surprisingly generative and associative, like poetry, capable of adding new words and new relations i to our articulation of the world.

The third section of Recitatif features Lucille Clifton’s “mulberry fields,” a poem which poignantly connects the land to slavery, memory, markmaking, and renewal — all themes which appear in Jemison’s own work. Sped up, the poem’s repetitions provide a recognizable rhythm within the composition’s foreign meter and melody. The fourth segment includes quotations from Spike Lee’s groundbreaking film Do the Right Thing, protest slogans, and street fiction, which point to Jemison’s interest in the self-taught and the improvisational.

For example, Jemison translates text from Mary Monroe’s 2010 novel Red Light Wives (“My voice trembled so hard it sounded like singing"). Monroe, the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers, is a prolific and best-selling author who did not attend college.

With her use of Solresol, Jemison puts the viewer in the position of learning a new language, one that is simultaneously universal and entrenched in a culturally specific vocabulary. She seems to be asking — can the specific be translated into the universal? And vice versa? And what new responses can be produced from intuition, translation, and even misinterpretation?

Rise / the opposite of rise, 2017 Pencil and watercolor on paper, 22 × 28 inches

In tandem with Recitatif, Jemison presents drawings based on the scores for the work. Musical staves drawn in black pencil on white paper are punctuated with yellow strokes that stand in for notes. Instead of the usual horizontal orientation, Jemison’s notations are unmoored from a rigid linear system, drawn at angles, playfully intersecting with one another as they seem to dance across the wall.

They can be read as text, music, symbols, or as abstractions, and both literally and metaphorically invite us to “read between the lines.” Throughout Jemison’s work, what is not visible is as fertile, as important, as what is.

The series of photographs in the exhibition likewise function through this mix of absence and abstraction, which Jemison understands as a way to access what lies beyond description, a space of the imagination. The enigmatic, evocative images are derived from the cover illustration of William H. Pease and Jane Pease’s 1963 book, “Black Utopia: Negro Communal experiments in America.” For Jemison, "the illustration functions as a schematic diagram of black emancipation and its ambiguities. It pictures a meandering line of black men who might be settlers or

soldiers, wielding pitchforks that might be tools or weapons, under a light that is both sun and moon — a symbol of enlightenment or a coded reference to the Nat Turner rebellion. ii Jemison isolates and enlarges details of the illustration — the texture of the paper and the pixilation of the enlargement producing evocative and atmospheric abstract gestures that veer on the painterly. Moving between clarity and disintegration under Jemison's close examination, these images give little indication of their source with the exception of a fragment of the book’s title. Yet, like the music and voices wafting through the exhibition, the images and codes that structure views on race and identity are an everpresent, if veiled or unregistered, backdrop. Even the restrained palette of the exhibition — white, black, yellow, and brown — utters symbolic meaning. Jemison has mounted the “Black Utopia” images on a bronzed, mirrored substrate which gives the works the look of sepia-toned photographs, harking back to the second half of the 19th century (an important moment for photography, moving away from the gray scale of black and white and coinciding with black emancipation). Although viewers are left to

imagine for themselves the origin and meaning of the haunting images, we/they are pictured, implicated in the reflective surfaces, placed both inside and outside at the same time.

even transcendent experience akin to a spiritual conversion. Jemison’s choice of material suggests the light of enlightenment (though the medium is more closely associated with bar signs — or those of the jazz clubs where the likes of Armstrong played — than traditional signs from God). In the context of a museum, Jemison’s neon recalls Bruce Nauman’s seminal work, The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths (1967), which spelled out this titular aphorism in a spiral of neon script. Like Nauman’s work, Jemison’s is both sardonic and serious, and the veracity or viability of her message ambiguous.

Jemison further mines the tensions between the private and the public with a multi-year project engaging the writings of the African American “outsider” artist James Hampton. Along with a silver and gold altar made from recycled materials which was found only after his death, Hampton left behind a notebook (or perhaps a religious testament) written in a personal language which has yet to be deciphered.

Jemison presents many of Hampton’s marks and symbols in acrylic on clear vertical panels of acetate. The magnified calligraphic gestures seem familiar, almost recognizable, yet their meaning is ultimately not legible. With these works Jemison restages the condition of illiteracy for gallery visitors, upending traditional power dynamics, making true the usually false notion that all viewers can come to an artwork on equal footing despite racial, gender, or cultural specificities. At the same time, she is invested in the desire that these works produce, the longing to know and to bridge what seems an impossible distance.

In an adjacent gallery, Jemison presents a series of neon letters spelling out “revelation” in a halo-like glow of yellow-gold. Hampton had written this word at the bottom of many pages of his notebook. Elswehere, Jemison references a variety of these kinds of “aha” moments or awakenings at the threshold between pre-literacy and literacy, in both secular and spiritual terms. That flash of comprehension can be an epiphany and also, of course, a moment of empowerment. Literacy narratives, and particularly slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass’ influential biography, speak of the mastery of language as the key to freedom, and an entry into the political sphere. Jemison’s exhibition explores two different poles — the impulse to wield language as a unifier, and to use it is a method of retreat. REVELATiON also articulates the expectation that so many of us have of an encounter with art — a transformative,

This work shares a space with excerpts from an ongoing experimental text work that Jemison calls a novella for lack of a more apt description.

Titled Plant you now, dig you later, like the exhibition, Jemison’s writing weaves together dialogue taking place in various time periods — before 1850, after 1940, and in the present.

The work touches on recurring themes of literacy, self-education, and creative resistance.

Like her translation of “revelation” into sculptural form, she has taken her novella off the page, presenting her words directly on the architecture in the space, more like an object.

The novella can be seen to both mimic and supersede the museum’s familiar didactic writing, presenting a non-linear text that avoids the kind of reductive clarity of an institutional one. Just as it moves through space, the text moves in and out of time, reshuffled and resistant to a traditional narrative order. Never static, never closed or resolved, Jemison’s text, like Armstrong’s, strives through new linguistic formulations for an alternative imaginary.

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In his Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant proposes that identity and culture are products of multiple complex relations instead of fixed binaries and that language and poetry can articulate this multiform reality.

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In The Confessions of Nat Turner, an account that figures in a number of Jemison’s works, Turner describes from prison the hieroglyphic visions which appeared on cornstalks at the time of a solar disturbance. He read both as a message from God and was inspired to execute his legendary rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Virginia in 1831.

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkeley, CA) holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003).

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria; the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Drawing Center in New York; LAX><ART, Los Angeles, CA; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI. In 2017 she will have solo shows at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and CAPC Bordeaux.

She has participated in artist residencies at the Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, Florida; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Skowhegan School of Painting. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has taught art at Columbia University, The New School/Parsons School of Design, Wellesley College, Trinity College, Rice University, the Cooper Union, and Williams College.

Jemison's publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Harold Mendez, Jina Valentine, Szu-Han Ho, and others. Jemison is currently based in Brooklyn.

Cover: Detail of Black Utopia (Sol 2), 2017 UV inkjet print on acrylic, 59 × 59 inches Inside flap: Same Time, 2016 Acrylic on polyester film, each work 160 × 20 inches, installation at Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington at Seattle

Steffani Jemison: Plant You Now, Dig You Later On view March 18, 2017 – January 2018 Major exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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