November 2020
Images Courtesy of Alex Nuñez
Words by Yadira Capaz
What do Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, American Sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler, and American conceptual text artist Glenn Ligon have in common? They are all inspiration for the artists in residence at the Fountainhead in November of 2020. Hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, Héctor Jimenez Castillo creates prolifically across mediums excavating the collective unconscious for poetic scenes that move us beyond Reason. Sedrick Chisom grew up in Philadelphia, but is now firmly rooted in New York City’s intellectual culture painting visions of sci-fi futures that invert thoroughly researched historical tropes around race and the monstrous Other. Living between Ghana and Los Angeles, Kenturah Davis interrogates the way language intersects with embodied experience, at shifting scales from the personal to the political to the universal.
From the outside, you wouldn’t guess a quiet Miami Modern home in the historic Morningside neighborhood is bustling with artists that, as founder Kathryn Mikesell puts it, “are at an inflection point in their career, and this time in the residency can really make a difference in what they create.” The three artists live and work together for a month, while balancing a steady stream of guests and outings connecting them to the lively Miami arts ecosystem. In its 12th year now, the residency has been growing a family with over 430 artists from 47 countries.
There is a fertile split in the conceptual frameworks between the imaginative openness of Héctor, and the strategic meaning in the work of Kenturah and Sedrick. The way they are influencing each other is unspoken, but the lineages coalesce in interesting ways. For example, Kenturah is exploring text as textile in spools of thread hiding African proverbs, and on the other side of the wall Héctor has been dreaming up an embroidered recreation of a 16th century Spanish manuscript about spiritual crisis.
Sedrick explains how “I wouldn’t just go up to Héctor asking ‘so what is the conceptual framework of your work?”’ Héctor laughs, “I’d tell you to go back to your studio!” Instead they enter each other’s worlds indirectly. Specifically, and perhaps surprisingly, watching a list of horror films recommended to Sedrick by a friend, which has become a bonding activity in the evening. A strange point of entry at first, but quite revealing of differing perspectives: Héctor is interested in media for the effect of images on the subconscious, and Sedrick for what the character tropes reveal about history. “I love that this is a non-judgmental space, without any competition, just curiosity and encouragement, where we get to connect over our shared struggles as artists,” Héctor says.
In previous years, a November residency would have meant the heightened excitement of Miami Art Week on the horizon, but this year Fountainhead has decided to respect quarantine measures and keep visits by appointment only. This quieter November has suited the artists well. “Kathryn kindly asked what each of us needed, and I told her my truth: I just need to rest,” Kenturah recalls. There has been plenty of time to rest, and that slow unfolding of time has opened the space for incredible productivity, too. Sedrick had already finished 3 large charcoal drawings, and mused that he “had been thinking of making another one with my last week here.” On the evening of the monthly Open House, the three artists mingled with curators and scientists on the patio discussing important Miami topics like the possibility of measuring sea level rise with buoys and the intrigue of Latin American political history. This convivial moment is a typical experience at the Fountainhead, but not to be taken for granted during COVID-19 restrictions, which have made them rarer.
Finally, as Miami slowly opens up, the residency artists have been able to explore the city’s arts institutions once again. They fondly recall the joy of lingering in the Yayoi Kusama infinity room in the Rubell Museum, then spending a rainy afternoon chatting together outside when the Rubells returned their visit. “It’s cool to see pieces in real life that you’ve only seen as tiny photos in books before,” said Héctor. Sedrick also marveled at the diversity in the artists curated in Miami’s art museums, joking about how “It’s not Dia:Beacon, you know what I mean?” When asked, it’s hard for them to articulate just how this month is affecting their practice. “A month offers enough time for condensation, and the effects are always clearer to point to after,” Sedrick noted.
Héctor Jiménez Castillo
“I work with capricho,” Héctor Jiménez Castillo explains. Capricho is a word in Spanish that translates to whim or caprice, and refers to the stubborn pursuit of an impulsive desire. With intuition and chance as his guides, he consumes vast amounts of images to create new ones. His process has its own timing, because, as he says, “the image has to be digested by the inner imaginarium.” For example, on a recent visit to The Center for Subtropical Affairs, he fixated on the gravel pebbles on the floor and decided to make a pedestal from the material. He creates something every day to keep that channel open. Even if that means crumpling up his creations “as if it never happened.”
“I separate Poetry from Reason. Sometimes people try too hard to intellectualize. I follow the scenes that come to me. The work can talk by itself. A man can be holding a balloon. It’s not about what it means, but it makes someone in the audience cry, and they don’t quite know why. It doesn’t come from a political place, it becomes political after,” Héctor says. Hearing him describe his process summons a history of artists who explore the collective unconscious with reverence and humility. It’s no surprise he is watching a documentary of Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington during his time at the residency. On the edges of his thought are the experiments of performance artists like Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark from Brazil, the magical realism of novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, and Latin America’s rich cultural imaginary of Catholic and indigenous mysticism.
Though a lesser known part of his practice, his desk is crowded with eerie, often violent drawings of bodies hidden in the landscape. Héctor reflects on how “people are taking my visual work a lot more seriously here in Miami. Being here has also made me think more about scale, like maybe I can work at a larger scale. Seeing large paintings in the exhibits we visited is inspiring me to grow mine in size.” His creative practice includes daily sketches in a notebook, which he stresses he does “after morning showers.” For someone working with the nuances of the subconscious, details like this make a difference.
His practice is a multi-headed creature, which like a Hydra, sprouts new possibilities when one head is cut off. “I am always multitasking. I have to be moving around multiple projects at once,” Héctor shares. Back in Mexico, he is known as one of the co-founders of Arrogante Albino, a performance art collective that focuses on the body and measurement. He also frequently collaborates with other artists as a choreographer, or set and costume designer. He recently created an experimental video art piece with multiple narrators detailing the architecture of an exhibition space as they filmed their walk through the space. Separated from his collaborative artistic community back home, here he channels expression through drawing and sculpture.
“I have to devote myself to my work so I don’t go mad,” Héctor exclaims. He says his studio is his laptop and his bed, so what he’s most grateful for being at the Fountainhead is the “freedom of time, like being on vacation but still working at my own pace.” On the wall of his studio at the Fountainhead is a large print-out of a 16th-century manuscript that is reminiscent of concrete poetry, and historic dance notation. It reads “Monte Carmelo” in large letters. Héctor plans on embroidering the text onto a canvas. He doesn’t explain why, but it turns out “Monte Carmelo” is a place in Israel, and the text is from “The Ascent to Mt. Carmel” by Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. St. John’s more well-known work is the classic “The Dark Night of the Soul” about surviving a spiritual crisis. Apropos for the pandemic, and an artist reflecting on his practice separated from his artistic community. One of the memorable lines from The Ascent to Mt. Carmel is “To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing.”
Sedrick Chisom
Without hesitation, Sedrick Chisom points to the Dana Schutz “Open Casket” controversy from the Whitney Biennial in 2017 as a critical catalyst for his current body of work. In the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, the art world went up in arms about a white woman’s exploitation of Emmett Till’s dismembered face. The controversy happened just as he was beginning his MFA at Rutgers, and it led him to create sci-fi paintings that invert racist tropes where, as he says, “the direct subject of racism points to white people, not blackness.” Made in a time of alt-right uprisings under Trump’s presidency, the finished pieces use toxic pigment and hallucinatory colors to create sinister visions of a future marked by climate change and nuclear fallout, still haunted by white nationalist ghosts. All the paintings animate scenes from a 10,000 word play he tried to submit as his thesis, but which has instead become the primary source for his practice.
When visiting Sedrick’s studio you’re torn between looking closely at the mesmerizing works on the wall, and learning from his thorough scholarly research which he shares in generous detail. “The books I bring are the sources I work from,” he explains. The rising influence of Afrofuturism in pop culture and lauded sci-fi writers like Octavia Butler are clear foundations for his work. Now he is researching whiteness in the literary imagination to take it a step beyond. He reads “The Folk Dress of Europe” by James Snowden as inspiration for his character studies. In it, he found that the etymology of the word peasant means villain, and has been untangling the class/race bias it implies along with its associations with the monstrous Other. He has also been reading “The Turner Diaries” by William Luther Pierce as a way to understand the mind of white nationalists, and inform his take on the Confederate soldiers that feature prominently in his work. Another book he keeps coming back to is “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad as a confrontational mirror for the violence of colonial conquest. On his desk is a drawing of a headless man that synthesizes this rhizomatic framework. While exploring the white imaginary of the Other, he also critiques the trope of the explorer as the diver or the astronaut by turning these into sinister mutants rather than the heroes at the center of the story.
On the wall of his studio in the garage, Sedrick has three large charcoal drawings with their smaller sketches on the side. His production process begins as a pen sketch that is scanned and then edited and reworked until it pleases him. He then uses a projector to blow them up to scale. For his time at Fountainhead, he decided to travel light and packed only charcoal. When he returns back home, he will begin the process of making yet another version in a blend of oil and spray paint to create the layered, dripping surface textures that mark his style. As finished pieces, the works begin to resemble a graphic novel, but with a unique aesthetic and critical take on narrative tropes.
It’s hard not to notice the way the post-apocalyptic future in his paintings has an eerie resonance in Miami in 2020. Our own impending struggles with climate change and the global COVID-19 pandemic are only some of the many similarities. Sedrick responds to these connections, “I’ve been thinking of redrawing the map of the United States I made for the world I created. I want to cut out Florida to acknowledge sea level rise in this imagined future.” Luckily, the impending doom has not impeded his connection to water during his time here. He speaks joyously of their group beach day and of his first time kayaking, and with a certain awe for the way these experiences have impacted his linework: “the figures are becoming looser, more fluid, like liquid apparitions.” He is also fascinated by the way his paintings are read through the eyes of Miami audiences which open up connections to the pantheon of Haitian vodou deities, and have drawn comparisons to the mythology in the paintings of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. These offer potent new directions for his insatiable research, which he welcomes as needed inspiration for new projects.
Kenturah Davis
“I am interested in the way language intersects with our perception of the world and the realities it creates. I move between legibility and illegibility to expand the understanding of our relationship to language,” Kenturah Davis explains a core inquiry in her practice. From 2016 to 2019, she spent her time writing out an excerpt from the 13th amendment debates by hand in a set of 200 10”x10” panels that became her piece “Study for Entanglements.” The 13th amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery, but made an exception in simple terms: “except as punishment for a crime.” This gave rise to the prison-industrial complex we have today as a legal form of modern-day slavery. When you step closer to this large-scale piece, you can see she used the repetition of specific words to create the ink and pencil portrait of herself that emerges in a uniquely liminal pose, almost as if thrown off-kilter by the words. She cites Glenn Ligon’s text works and Julie Mehretu’s use of scale to discuss superstructures as major influences in her choice to make her pieces scalable to a 10”x10” book.
During her time in the residency Kenturah is experimenting with the details of making new pieces to continue this series. She is shifting away from handwriting, and instead recently used an engraved plexiglass plate to emboss the text on 300 gram paper that she brought. Along the wall of her studio you can see how she has been considering various pigments to play with the legibility of the embossed text. There are photos on display as well that show she has been doing movement studies to explore new figures that will intersect with the text. She often photographs herself first, but also frequently collaborates with dancers as inspiration for her portraits. “The Director of Education at PAMM, Marie Vickles, passed by the other day and connected me to some dancers in Miami. I will be doing a photoshoot with them soon,” she shares with excitement. The classic book “Flash of the Spirit” by Robert Farris Thompson about African spirituality and dance sits on her desk. She plans on taking the research she has done here back home to create the new pieces at full scale.
Her focus on text has led her to textiles as a new conceptual avenue, specifically writing out a text and weaving it into a textile. She has an arrangement of these experiments by her desk in various stages. The text she’s been working from is a book of African proverbs that fascinates her because, as she says, “the philosophy in oral traditions is more widely diffused throughout a culture regardless of class.” One piece, for example, functions like a spool of thread. The text is not legible, but she is, in her own words, “interested in something having secrets, having information that doesn’t rely on someone explicitly knowing what it says.” She connects this to the history of enslaved African people sending messages of freedom encoded in garments and quilts. The meaning behind each of her artistic choices is meticulously considered, and it’s interesting to encounter her in the early stages of a new body of work where there is still so much room for possibility.
Kenturah had been in Miami many years ago working the fairs, but enjoys visiting now with ample time: “I like to notice the nuances of Miami, and be affected by the ephemera of a new place.” She says “being in Miami makes me long for Accra, especially the beach.” After a busy week touring various art institutions, the three artists finally had a beach day. For Kenturah, that moment was a healing punctuation: “feeling weightless in the water, immersed in a force of nature, I felt reminded that you can’t take things for granted.”