North America
Steffani Jemison
The Meaning of Various Photographs of Tyrand Needham
2009 - 2010
Steffani Jemison, The Meaning of Various Photographs of Tyrand Needham, 2009 - 2010
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Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various Photographs to Ed Henderson (1973)—with Black protagonists, as one teenage boy asks another to interpret stock images of Black men. Jemison’s complex (and often archly funny) appropriations peg the racial and affective blind spots of that first generation of Conceptual practice, always attuned to the fact that, as she puts it, “one person’s neutral vessel is another person’s politically freighted, irreducibly marked load.”
Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture. She uses rigorous formal methods to explore her interests in the politics of serial form, the limits of narrative description, and the tension between improvisation, repetition, and fugitivity.