(San Francisco, CA – November 2008) – McCaig Welles and Rosenthal is proud to present Rooted In America, a solo exhibition by California-based artist, Renee Billingslea. Picking up where her show Fabric of Race left off, Billingslea continues her poignant historic exploration of lynching, race, and identity in American society through riveting mixed media works and installations. The exhibition will commence with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, November 22, 6 – 9 p.m. and will remain on view through January 3, 2009.
For Rooted in America, Billingslea pushes the boundaries her Fabric of Race, which focused on preserving the names of lynching victims, by examining individual stories, creating a new form of literature through mixed media installations with the artist as visual storyteller. Billingslea looks through the emotional lens of victim Jesse Washington, the 17-year old mentally retarded farmhand from Waco, Texas, to reveal the rawness and reality of the racial violence branded into our nation’s past.
Billingslea’s works and installations provide a tactical experience with history. Each component of the show provides its own localized and personal narrative that is essential to the collective story and message. She begins her story with a group of shirts that have been treated and stained with coffee, burn marks and tears. Each shirt is paired with a hand-sewn personalized nametag giving it an identity -- giving it life. For the next chapter in her narrative, Billingslea infuses three rescued books with emotional novellas by stitching together found materials within the pages and covers. Through this, transformation, Billingslea gives the books a new purpose and meaning and creates a renewed form of literature where truth reveals itself without apology. One of the converted books, People Color #1, depicts vintage magazine paper cutouts of young girls, each hand-colored by the artist with crayon in skin tones ranging from fair to medium to dark. Billingslea separates the image of the darker skinned girl from the rest of the group, evoking tension and isolation. The used crayon tips are grouped inside a square cutout from the book’s pages, further symbolizing racial identity, as the sum of a whole. While the three books are placed together on a shelf, each maintains its individuality.
Billingslea also incorporates her narrative in the form of traditional hats molded from pages of old books. The laid text coated with varnish gives each hat an identity pertaining to the roles of men, women and children, among the lynching crowd, and, subsequently, a reference to what they possibly “witnessed, heard, smelled, observed.” Using the antiquated Van Dyke photographic process, Billingslea takes digital negatives of appropriated images from old lynching postcards and transfers the image onto homemade muslin ties. By taking images of the crowd rather than the lynching itself, Billingslea creates an environment where “the viewer looks at the viewer.” Through the “Sunday best” accessories on display, Billingslea implicitly reveals the spectacle nature of lynches, despite their horrific cruelty. Subtly, Billingslea’s work generates a group mentality, stemming from the lynching mobs, but displaces violence and hate the lynching represented, by challenging her crowd to ask questions of the objects before them, become educated, and ultimately choose to participate in eradicating racism that is so entrenched in our nation’s history and modern society.
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