March
Reordering Our Humanity
by Niama Safia Sandy
This month’s residency was generously sponsored by Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation.
In her 2019 essay “The Music of the Spheres,” Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts writes “the felt senses do not enter history.” I suspect the time and events happening before our eyes have and will continue to shift that. The work of women artists like Gisela McDaniel, Rachel Stern, and Rashayla Marie Brown, the three members of the March 2022 cohort of Fountainhead Residency, will all be a part of that shift. Each forging new paths within the traditions of portraiture, photography, and performance, collectively their work is rooted in an ethos of care, protection, and transformation—exactly what is needed in a time when our rights and very lives are being senselessly snatched from us. Respectively, each of these women artists take the history of their chosen medium and turn it on its head. They don’t simply recontextualize the ways the medium is executed, but they also each reframe how the work functions to navigate us toward richer ways of living and connecting to ourselves and the futures we desire.
In her current body of work, Gisela McDaniel wields care, color, form, and line as a mechanism for healing, protection, and community building. The artist’s ever-shifting and vibrant oeuvre is created to offer space for clearing and restitution against the centuries-old logic and intergenerational trauma of racism and sexual violence. Filtered through her community-engaged praxis and her Chamorro heritage, she constructs her figurative works; the adornments worn by her sitters are chosen by the subjects themselves. They are often invited into the process in other ways: selecting their poses, the items in the frame of the portrait, and other elements of the final work.
McDaniel’s care for the comfort and well-being of her subjects is paramount. The very process through which the artist works is in direct critique and disruption of traditional European portraiture notions of the exotic and her gaze is turned upon Indigenous people and women in particular. Speaking directly to Paul Gaugin’s portrayals of the Indigenous women of Tahiti exacted under the aegis of white settler colonialism, McDaniel builds encampments around her subjects aimed at safeguarding and showing their full humanity.
Rachel Stern’s current body of self-described nouveau pictorialism places layers of textual cues, low-fi filmic sensibilities, rich textures, and full-throated color in collision with history through photography. Remarkably, there is no editing software used. It’s all cut paper, fabric backdrops, plexiglass overlays, and other manipulations in the staging of the captured image. Building off her last project referencing Voltaire’s seminal text Candide, Stern positions her subjects in a menagerie of text, fabrics, flowers, plants, and food objects (often ordered from internet farmers’ markets) that are equal parts exotic and mundane to evoke the absurdity, chaos, and decay inherent in contemporary life in the West. Her images parse the traditions of still life and portraiture to mark centuries of empire and the subsequent transformation of the movement of people and goods into our current rapacious “one-click” pattern of commodification and consumption. Daikon, persimmon, and taro leaves from East Asia. Protea flowers from Southern Africa. She places renewed focus on that which was formerly at the margins of the West and has become ubiquitous and readily available. You can almost smell the verdure of the plants, and feel the plumpness-cum-perishableness of the fruits and vegetables she selects. It is somehow a mediated and yet full activation of the senses—if you’re really looking. In offering us these macroscopic scenes, Stern invites us to pull the allegorical threads of our world to unravel this deeply pernicious reality.
Self-proclaimed “undisciplinary artist-scholar” Rashayla Marie Brown’s new process-based filmic and installation work is rooted in performance and the interrogation and interruption of the standard three-act narrative structure. She is most interested in intersection and extension: how film has influenced photography, performance has been changed by painting, sculpture shifted by performance, writing, and so on. Brown’s works find her charting a tangential course from her performance and photography background; she’s exploring how she can shift the onus from her Black woman body as the focal point of labor, connection, contention, and history into new dimensions. For instance, making film, images, and writing exist as art objects and strata for provisional embodiments of narrative and performance.
Many of the stories and media portrayals involving Black people hinge on the expectation and overreliance on the depiction of trauma. Brown’s conceptual framework aims to push trauma into a methodological capacity for understanding the nuances of narrative, structure, and environment. The environment has been one built on the backs of Black folks in general and Black women in particular. Drawing a parallel to the history of the development of photography and film and its direct connection to the spoils of Black women’s stolen bodily autonomy and labor in the past two centuries, Brown seems to want to untether it all and lay it bare toward building something new that gives Black women their due.
Her experimentations in these new modes seek to build worlds where alternate endings are not only plausible but necessary and palliative. If a story is not final, then the language itself becomes effusive, malleable, permeable. This time and everything we have known before it necessitates that we move toward restoration and, what the artist calls, “radical possibility.”
RashaylaMarie
Brown
Rashayla Marie Brown is an “undisciplinary” artist, rejecting the formality of institutional artmaking in favor of a practice that questions the hierarchies these labels allow to persist. Working principally in performance, installation, writing, filmmaking, and photography, Brown’s work uncovers the erasure of Black femme history, utilizing bold colors, domestic and spiritual references, and staged images of friends and family in her work. Drawing from a background as a DJ, graphic designer, and spoken word artist, her work parallels these art forms, favored for their accessibility and ability to make an impact among a wide audience. Using these mediums allows Brown to consider what photos and films can often tend to exclude or omit from historical narratives. Her childhood upbringing in Germany informs much of the way she considers selfhood, filtered through a new reality once she returned to the United States.
Working both collaboratively and intuitively, and drawing from her own spiritual work and experience, Brown’s process often begins with a conversation. These words form the basis of her research, marking the starting line of inquiry from which she will build out the work’s chosen materials and form. Rooted in social justice, Brown’s work questions power dynamics within race, religion, gender, sexuality, and mental health constructs. She believes artists need to stand in direct opposition to harmful institutions. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University in collaboration with the Isaac Julien Lab at UC-Santa Cruz, and most recently exhibited with Recess Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Brown was born in Toledo, OH. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Bottom left: Brown in her studio at Fountainhead Residency, photographed by Christina Arza. Above: The Motion Picture Association for Maintaining Personal Ambivalence, 2022. Installation, image courtesy of the artist. Bottom right: A Precedent (part of The Domestication Effect), 2022. Photograph in custom frame and polaroid with contribution to college fund for artist’s niece.
Gisela
McDaniel
Gisela McDaniel’s work arises out of the community she’s built upon shared trauma and reclaims the narrative around sexual violence to empower and celebrate her subjects’ strength. Her large-scale, often interactive paintings of women—usually friends, family, or women within her orbit—are created in collaboration with her subjects; they work in tandem with McDaniel to pose and choose the setting, objects, and colors foregrounding their image. According to McDaniel, the painting becomes a visual telling of her subjects’ stories and an opportunity for the viewer to acknowledge how they take up space. She intentionally works on canvases that are at least six inches thick, an allusion to the space she wants to hold for the women she paints. In some instances, McDaniel uses motion sensor technology to bring the painting to life when a viewer walks past it.
Her process involves bringing her subjects in for a conversation, where they discuss which objects are important to them and how they would pose, creating an aura of identity around them. Giving her subjects this level of autonomy allows them to control how their image is perceived. Taking a photo of their design, McDaniel uses the photograph to guide her painting, she hints at who they truly are and want to be. McDaniel is represented by Pilar Corrias gallery in London, has work in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami, and was recently featured in Hyperallergic and Artnet. She was born in Bellevue, NE, and currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.
Above: McDaniel in her studio at Fountainhead Residency, photographed by Christina Arza; Are You Watching? 2022. Archival pigment print on Photorag paper with neon silkscreen layers and bespoke, high-build varnish details, photographed in McDaniel’s Fountainhead studio by Arza. Right: Tiningo Si Serena, 2021. Oil on canvas, objects from subject-collaborator, shell, and sound; A portrait of McDaniel by Arza.
Rachel Stern
Rachel Stern draws parallels between the illusion of photography and the paradox of kitsch, an aesthetic quality she defines as striving for something that is otherwise inaccessible. She explores a kind of ‘trickle-down aesthetic history’ to better understand why particular icons of art history are mass-produced into everyday objects and embody certain cultural meanings. While her work usually takes shape in installation, sculpture, and other media, Stern initially builds everything through the lens of the camera, imagining the worlds she constructs in her studio as being moments in time rather than perceptible truths.
With formal training in photography, her works often begin with a reference from literature or pop culture, which she elaborates by photographing friends, family, or colleagues characterized through allegorical portraits. Drawing from everyday objects that litter her studio—crafts, knick-knacks, and other quotidian trappings—Stern builds onto and around the photograph itself, creating a subtle yet accessible inside joke for her viewers. Deploying objects that permeate our everyday life to create aesthetic beauty as a work of art, she relies on the camera’s ability to record the familiar but make it strange. Her photography and the world it both creates and inhabits reflects on the trappings of capitalism, reframing critical discourse around consumerism. An adjunct assistant professor of photography at Rutgers University, Stern’s work is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the MoMA Library and has been featured in The New York Times and Hyperallergic. Stern was born in the Bronx, NY. She currently lives and works in NY.
From left: Stern photographed in her studio by Christina Arza; a portrait of Stern in the field by Arza; If Thou Hadst Looked, 2021. Chromogenic print. Above: Installation view of More Weight, 2018. Frames, chromogenic print, and photographic wallpaper.
Stern, Decadence, 2021. C-print.
Stern, Installation view of This Terrestrial Paradise, 2020. Framed C-prints, photographic wallpaper, and stair poem by Paul Legault.
Stern, RECKLESS ABANDON, 2021.
C-print.
McDaniel, Deep Roots Blurred, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas with found objects.
McDaniel, Geftao Koroson-ña (Their Generous Heart), 2021. Oil on panel, found object, and sound.
McDaniel, On A Good Day, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas with found objects.
Brown, Tamara’s Repair, 2022. Photograph (Installation detail).
Brown, Reality Is Not Good Enough (Still), 2021. Film.
Brown, Don’t let the seeds keep you from enjoying the watermelon (A blurry photograph of Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox that I was too scared to take), 2022. Photograph in custom frame with artist’s contract.