Rashid Johnson

Untitled Escape Collage

In this piece, a mix of wax and black soap streaks across ceramic tiles and fragmented stock images of palm trees and African masks. Johnson’s use of masks is both a nod to his upbringing in a family that embraced African ancestry and a provocation about ownership and identification. His relationship with these images is ambivalent, as Untitled Escape Collage registers the complicated closeness and distance that comes with being a subject of diaspora while questioning who has the right to employ specific cultural motifs. Masking also suggests concealment, hidden emotion, and the assumption of different versions of the self. As suggested by the title, a tension of escapism underlies this piece. The stock images of palm trees symbolize the dream of escape while speaking to that dream’s artificiality and unrealized status. Scattered lines and smudges of oil across the work animate a frenetic, anxious energy, and the composite of cut photographs rejects the notion of a coherent and singular self.