Shaunté Gates: Notes on Making/Breaking Stories and Worlds

Shaunté Gates’ immersive tableaus employ multiple time-based media and are, perhaps paradoxically, somehow untethered from notions of linear time and space. He builds and bursts worlds. His works cast a net into an unknown timestream of possibilities, in search of community and a neutralization of the forces that keep us from being fully human. Contemporary life is ordered by a labyrinth created by social forces that enact a kind of narrative hold on our lives, bodies, hearts and imaginations the most important tool required for freedom. Through a methodology of psychogeographical interrogation, Gates’s “Land of Myth” dreamscapes are a circumnavigation of the social constructs of race, class, and the very real physical sites wherein people enact, inhabit and perform them. His near decade-long intervention acts as maps, megaliths, a meter for how far we are from a new paradigm. He experiments with and pushes the boundaries of story, material and form in an effort to loosen and to break the grip certain normative stories have over us.

Gates’ deeply immersive process engages drawing, photography, painting, sculpture and experiments with light, film and the built environment of his native Washington, D.C. The artist’s ongoing engagement with the architecture of D.C., began using the city’s public housing project buildings and the communities housed within them as a starting point. Raised bathed in the rapturous love of extended family and a network of close-knit neighbors before the blight of the 1980s and 1990s drug epidemic in the city, Gates watched the neighborhood and its architecture deteriorate before his very eyes. He has been haunted by what cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman calls “the terrible beauty” of it, and the ways narratives of addiction and various ideas about value have been used against the people who were most affected. Gates sees public residential housing complexes, like DC’s Barry Farm, Langston Terrace, and Lincoln Heights, as “semi-ruined temples,” damaged by economic and political neglect, the explosion of crack, the war on drugs and the subsequent devastation wrought on the Black bodies and futures housed within them. Having long considered the terrain of the housing project, Gates’ material interventions act simultaneously as a narrative and spiritual foundation — a site of undoing and new non-linear rhizomatic possibility where the past, present, dreams and reality all collide and coalesce into one another.

The artist moves intuitively. Sensing, recalling, allowing all of his faculties to be activated. Reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s engagement with material, Gates’ works are a cacophony of real and imagined signs, signifiers, stories, color, and techniques across space time. He also employs and riffs off of Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” which signals a methodology that combines archival research with critical theory and imagined narratives. While Hartman’s idea is linked to writing around the histories and afterlives of the Trans-Atlantic trade and the absences and silences the “peculiar institution” enacts upon enslaved women in particular, Gates joins the contemporary African diasporic tradition of bending and extending the notion as a visual strategy. Gates uses not only the archival but the archetypal, the filmic, the decorative. He samples and interpolates imagery from video games and films, architecture in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. The references feel like scrying. In one tableau, he samples chariots from Ben-Hur, Yul Brenner as Pharaoh Rameses II in the classic biblical epic film The Ten Commandments. There may be a not-exactly Corinthian column. The presence of these traditional Greek architectural gambits typically are meant to be an invocation of a certain kind of power and refinement. Upon closer inspection, Gates’ object is, in fact, not a real column at all. It is fashioned from playing cards, photographed and placed into the frame. His column is an altogether new symbol unattached to the machinations of state power and whiteness. It is play, memory, a signaling toward something new.

Through his recent explorations, concepts linked to the Situationists International movement have found their way into his psyche matching what his mind and hands had already made. The work unfolds within Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s framework of the dérive, “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” particularly in urban landscapes where they participate freely “drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” There’s also détournement, defined as the “integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu.” Gates’ “Land of Myth” works go further than this. These scenes irrupt Western notions of space – architectural, geological and sociological – and time itself.

It calls to mind Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conception of the undercommons. It is a dislocation from that which has sought to extinguish and contain us. It is maroonage. A relational positionality toward freedom. His scenes are at once runes and ruins. As the landscape of Gates’ dreamscapes flow through his process of building layers of photo, text, paint, design and filmic references, his figures too navigate their way through the labyrinth of norms placed upon them by outside forces through policy, history, and mass media.

Friends and family are often the photographed figures. Sometimes they are transfigured into a half-animal form or other motifs of mythology. He poses a stranger who happened to catch his eye in the street as a chariot rider in a photograph. Or whipping chopped, souped up vintage cars. He strips away the photo transfer just so on the panel, leaving the viewer to wonder whether the figure is real or imagined. They break out and through the landscapes Gates creates. He draws poppies there – signifying the beauty of nature, a remembrance of the fallen, and the addictive substance made from its milky sap that changed his community and so many others like it forever. He washes the wood panel in colors, movement and energy he dreamed. Drawn together, the series seeks to examine the story itself — its construction, its power, and what we believe in as a result of its presence and dominance, and whether a new story is needed and possible. The works ask “How do you come out of this story to become who you really are?;” a difficult question in the wake of capitalism and its political, racial and economic excesses. How do we stretch ourselves toward a life ungoverned by the emotional, physical, political and economic architectures that have kept us in a holding pattern for the last several hundred years. Gates’ exploration delves into the both psychological dimension and the physical structures that reinforce them and hold up other institutional structures that merge with the artist’s experiences and memories and the world itself.

The exhibition The Night Before: Parachutes & Poppies is currently on view and closes on February 28. We encourage readers to experience the work in person before it concludes. This essay was initially commissioned and published by Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery.

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About the Contributor:

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist, cultural anthropologist, curator, and educator. Her work explores culture, healing, history, migration, music, race, and ritual—using visual, written, and performative arts to tell familiar stories in transformative ways.

Her recent paintings and sculptures center a form she calls “The Groove,” a mathematical yet unquantifiable structure that resists the commodifying logics of whiteness and capitalism. Through it, Sandy engages time—past, present, and future—as a pathway toward balance, restoration, and freedom. Her artist residencies include The Last Resort Artist Retreat, The Watermill Center, 37d03d, and Ma’s House. She has taught at Columbia University, and Pratt Institute.

As a curator and producer, she has collaborated with artists and institutions including The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Public Theater, and WinterJazzFest. She is a co-founder of THIS IS A MOVEMENT, an initiative advancing gender equity in Jazz and Creative Music through an intersectional Black feminist lens.

Instagram: @___niama___
www.niamasafiasandy.com