A review by Marsha Pearce
The blue-black night sky takes female, human form in Brianna McCarthy’s third solo exhibition Vétiver Night Women. The sky, however, is not reduced to physicality. It is the human body that the artist invites viewers to consider in an expanded state. Each of McCarthy’s portraits is a fragment of the firmament—her dark female faces dotted with stars—that when taken together become an astronomical picture, a galaxy of bold beings that exist beyond flesh.
McCarthy rewrites images of debased blackness, pushing them beyond stereotypical boundaries and opening them up to understandings in a mental framework where the sky is the limit. Her artworks are manifestations of a mending process that attends to a black experience of amnesia that wipes away self-love and the knowledge of mighty legacies—a memory loss that creates a prison marked by diminution.
Red thread is a key motif in the various paintings—one that the artist uses as a symbol of resistance to counter forgetting. Red thread loops in the earlobes of figures in such paintings as Laro, A Sky for My Moons and I Wear These to Remember. Scarlet strands are also wound around the necks of the women in For Sea in Air and Nana Buku. They are reminders to speak one’s truth and to be receptive to intuition’s whisper. They also signify bloodlines, serving as an aide-memoire for seeing connections between women past and present.
Her women are goddesses framed by discs of light and aureoles made of leaves. By visually pairing them with the vétiver plant (vétiver oil is said to alleviate stress and trauma and vétiver roots reduce soil erosion) the women are also rendered as being tied to nature’s power. They are healers and grounding forces. Like the slave sisterhood described in Marlon James’ novel titled The Book of Night Women, McCarthy’s figures are revolutionists. Her painted women are agitators for freedom; for a change in how the black female body is perceived and valued.
Yet, this third show, with all of its efforts to rethink the female form, largely carries a compositional look and feel that too closely echoes those forms seen in works from McCarthy’s previous solo exhibitions. This visual repetition dulls the edge of her ideas rather than sharpening it. Brianna McCarthy’s depictions of patterns and textures are exquisite but she is due for a revolution in her art. By daring to upset the boundaries of her art making, this undoubtedly talented artist can potentially solidify her place in the night sky within a constellation of image-makers.
MORE INFO
Vétiver Night Women continues until June 5 at Medulla Art Gallery,
37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook.
Call 740-7597.