Strangers Selves

*Exhibition dates subject to change.

What is the self, other than a collection of disparate elements with which we identify, and that, with some margin of shared meaning, we use to relate to others? This exhibition brings together three late artists who worked primarily in collage, negotiating the concept of self-identity as pastiche in and through their work. For Lee D’Arthur, Aporia Francesco, and Zack Jones, being an artist was itself integral to how they formed their identities, sometimes to extremes. These works particularly find the artists grappling with the complexity of representing themselves through their artwork, and the dichotomy between the opportunity for expression that offers and the simultaneous entrapment within the work it seems to present. 

Lee D’Arthur (c. 1889-1977), the most prominent of these artists, and likely inspirational to the other two, was a decidedly enigmatic figure. Her work is often believed to be a codified key to her true identity (D’Arthur was the pseudonym of Harriet Toomer), but scholarship continues to develop and conflict around the exact meaning of many of her pieces. Here, the work functions as a parallel to the artist’s personhood, revealing and obfuscating aspects of her identity while simultaneously serving to shield her true identity while criticizing politics and government. 

This exhibition marks the first public showing of the work of Zack Jones (1960-1991), an activist and artist who lived between New York City and San Francisco throughout his tragically short life. His magnum opus, the imposing collage “New York City Do Over,” 1991, a layered and frenetic self-portrait, which Jones produced in a creative burst during the final months of his life, shows him claiming an autobiographical narrative. The work communicates the exhaustion and desperation Jones perhaps felt near the end of a lifetime spent fighting in the AIDS movement, and toiling as an obscure artist. 

The style of Aporia Francesco’s (1971-1995) collage work exhibited here is something more akin to re-photographed assemblage. Francesco is better known for her experimental, yet more traditional photography, and here we see early experiments in the study of herself she developed throughout her career. These pieces see her turning her eye on herself – or rather, looking through the social lens at the body of the woman, the artist, and the tension between muse and maker, particularly when they are the same person. 

Each of these artists’ collaged self-portraits make a case for the artist as one ever trapped within a frame(work) of their own designs, and for the self as always a cohesive assemblage of disparate fragments – as is the medium of collage itself. One’s self is always a fragmentary entity, always slightly torn between self and stranger. And who is an artist if not their work? But it is through interpretation that an artwork achieves its final form – just as it is through relating to an other that one becomes themselves. This exhibition invites viewers to recognize their active participation in the creative process as they engage with these stranger selves. 

bassandreiner.com