Lyle Ashton Harris, Nyame Bekyere, 2019

Harris’ series of arresting mixed-media assemblages are comprised of monochromatically photographed collages inset into fabric panels patterned in characteristic West African motifs variously overlaid with stencilled letterforms using acrylic spray paint or selectively appended with the artist’s personal mementos.

Harris deploys multiple formal and conceptual strategies that intentionally reconfigure meanings to refine his ongoing engagement with themes of difference while further integrating his aesthetic methodologies (using photography, collage, personal archives). The result is a veritable Afro-fusion of historical and contemporary global cross-references that induces a revelatory slippage between the personal and the political. Harris’s multilayered new assemblages constitute a sui generis aesthetic investigation into shared social and cultural histories that implicate us all.

In a feature article published in Artnews (April 2019), the Guggenheim Museum’s Senior Curator of Photography Jennifer Blessing has observed that Harris’s art work is “so prescient, as a technique and a way of working,” characterizing it as “a personal history. It’s a kind of self-portraiture through objects, photographs, and papers.” Describing his work as “complex and beautiful,” Guggenheim Senior Curator and Associate Director Nancy Spector also recently noted how Harris “poetically interrogates issues,” acknowledging that his ”insights and guidance have been integral to our work” at the Guggenheim.

Suffused into aluminum using the dye sublimation process, resulting in highly saturated, intense coloration, the photo components in the new assemblages are composed by Harris through photographically “re-sampling” his dense wall collages, which are aggregated through excavations from his personal archive. Obliquely illuminated to produce shadowy effects, the chiaroscuro of juxtaposed elements constellate a host of personally resonant ephemera, including imagery culled from the internet, archival news clippings, the artist’s handwritten notes, re-photographed or painted renderings of the artist’s work, interspersed with hand-stenciled multicolored polycarbonate gels.

Embedded against a ground of repeating graphic patterns distinctive to African textiles, the tenebrous photographs conjugate light and shadow to produce a fresh remix of figural and abstract forms, embodying a singular visual alchemy that remains unique to each work.

Lyle Ashton Harris United States, b. 1965

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Lyle Ashton Harris United States, b. 1965

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