Stony the Highway, photographer Dawoud Bey’s present exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, led me to some against-the-grain considering that provoked a number of vexing conclusions. It would do the identical for you.
In case you had been to look on the reclusively lit gelatin silver images mounted on Dibond, as I did, you’ll encounter forest scenes during which dappled daylight pierces via a leaf cover; the undulant surfaces of tranquil our bodies of water replicate the solar and the close by bushes; earthen paths gouged out by people curve and meander via verdant, pure development; and tree limbs intervene on these paths at odd angles, arced and bent like gnarled scaffolding. One phrase that aptly describes these scenes is “beautiful.”
Dawoud Bey, “Untitled (Tangled Branches)” (2023), gelatin silver print mounted to Dibond
Nonetheless, Bey is depicting the Richmond Slave Path, a two-and-a-half-mile path that when led the primary Black folks enslaved in the US from the Manchester Docks to the public sale homes of Shockoe Backside, in Richmond, Virginia. The gallery’s press launch insists on me seeing what is just not perceptible in these photographs:
Bey’s sequence captures the historic and emotional texture of the Richmond Slave Path—a well-trodden path of leaves, branches, and waterways that reveal the lingering imprints of the historical past of enslavement in America.
This feels like mysticism. The imprints of this historical past are exactly what’s not revealed; they’re truly obscured by the sylvan appeal of the pictures.
I’ve written prior to now about Bey’s concurrently speculative and documentary work. I nonetheless battle to see extra in these images than the pastoral magnificence they current. I can’t understand the African captives marched into enslavement alongside this observe within the 1600s — to take action requires an act of creativeness. Satirically, the trail additionally exists as we speak as a historic strolling path described on a Virginia tourism net web page as a part of a province that’s “for lovers.” You, too, may expertise cognitive dissonance given historic descriptions and analyses of the brutality of the US’s slavery regime and the plethora of artwork made about this. I can’t carry these contrasting views right into a singular, coherent view regardless of how a lot I rub my eyes and squint. Maybe that’s the goal of the work: to point out that documentary images can shroud somewhat than illuminate.
Set up view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Highway at Sean Kelly, New York. Heart: the movie “350,000” (2023).
The press launch goes on to state: “Bey’s Stony the Road series is an ongoing exploration of the deep connections between African American history, the American landscape, and the traumas embedded in those landscapes.”
Can landscapes maintain traumas? And if they will, why would they maintain human ones? The earth is greater than 4.5 billion years previous. If it has a reminiscence, it’s a geologic one. The planet may recall the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years in the past, when an abundance of animals emerged onto the evolutionary scene. It would recall the Permian extinction about 250 million years in the past when one thing killed roughly 90% of the planet’s species. People solely developed agriculture and transitioned to a settlement life-style prior to now 12,000 years. Whereas acknowledging the depths of depravity of the transatlantic slave commerce, why would the land keep in mind this when it has probably skilled exponentially higher lack of life? Maybe I’m improper and the bottom remembers all the things. However so far as I can inform, this isn’t in proof.
The purpose is: We keep in mind, and it’s essential that we do, and never foist off our duty onto mute issues that don’t reply once we name. We people tend to undertaking onto different our bodies or beliefs — the universe, varied gods, destiny — that which our personal our bodies battle to bear and our intellects battle to carry. Maybe we use the land as a handy place to let these generational traumas relaxation as a result of they’re brutally heavy.
Set up view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Highway at Sean Kelly, New York
The artist most successfully makes use of his imaginative powers and inventiveness within the 10-minute movie “350,000” (2023), which refers back to the estimated 350,000 males, ladies, and kids bought from Richmond’s public sale blocks between 1830 and 1860. The movie, projected on two huge back-to-back screens, is a collaborative undertaking, with cinematography by Bron Moyi and the soundtrack developed with Virginia Commonwealth College Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod. The digicam slowly tracks the path, as if following the gaze of somebody attempting to grasp the place they’re and what this path results in, whereas at instances beguiled by the sunshine falling via awnings of leaves. The soundtrack begins out with scraping and scratching like heavy gear being moved. It then morphs into the grunts and groans of strenuous human labor. Later nonetheless, it adjustments into guttural enunciations that just about approximate speech.
What these enslaved folks truly skilled can solely be imagined, for probably the most half, as a result of we don’t have information of their sights and sounds. However we will attain out to them by invention. This interjection of our hypothesis right into a story of demolition and deprivation is our approach of constructing a approach out of no approach. It’s our approach of acknowledging our profound loss. The panorama that sits in stony silence will proceed to take action. Bey’s images don’t want the rhetorical staging of animistic perception. They’re elegiac and haunting, and converse poignantly to the African-American expertise of constructing magnificence out of probably the most wretched circumstances. And in telling the tales they inform, they exhibit that at instances it’s not factual fact we’re after, however emotional fact, and all these truths in tandem may set us free.
Dawoud Bey, “Untitled (Branches and James River)” (2023), gelatin silver print mounted to Dibond
Dawoud Bey: Stony the Highway continues at Sean Kelly gallery (475 tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) via February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.