Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn is pleased to present Contextual Proportions, an exhibition curated by Kenturah Davis, featuring works by Sadie Barnette, Adriana Corral, Kenturah Davis, Johnathan Payne, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Peter Williams.
Contextual Proportions examines the ways in which artists work with text and is inspired by Toni Morrison’s essay Sites of Memory, which states, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” The artists in the show work with text as a flexible material that can both amplify and diffuse ideas. They leverage written language to explore dualities including: legibility/illegibility and meaning/mystery. In the work of Adriana Corral and Sadie Barnette, classified/declassified documents are presented to confront systems meant to obfuscate truth to sustain the powers of the state. Kenturah Davis, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Peter Williams use charged and visually graphic text to engage with social and political issues. Johnathan Payne’s works obscure text through weaving in order to unravel the narrative force and tropes of comic books to assert other possibilities.