Double Rainbow: Future Archives
by Holly Bass (b. 1971) and Maps Glover (b.1992). Cosmic Garden, the CulturalDC presentation in the Mobile Art Gallery, is an immersive experience exploring the expansive works of Bass and Glover. The exhibition will include videos from Holly Bass’ archive of performances from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, archives of performance works from Glover from 2015-2020, collaborative performances, separate audio and sound as well as tactile experiences. Eschewing the traditional ROYGBIV rainbow, the artists were inspired by the SMPTE color bars, the television test pattern used by broadcast technicians to ensure that the screen colors reflect reality. The SMPTE color bars are a symbol of analog video and represent the changes in video technology, memory, and visual culture.
This work is informed by the Black experience, particularly the way video documentation functions to legitimize and validate Black life in a society that seeks to erase Black people’s humanity. Many have died unseen and unheard. George Floyd would most likely have died without recourse without the brief but necessary videography of Darnella Frazier. The important artworks of Black performance artists such as Adrian Piper, David Hammons, and Lorraine O’Grady would be lost without documentation. Glover and Bass recognize that creating public archives of their own experiences as Black artists and of Black family life emphasizes and preserves their importance in history.
This presentation of archival work shifts the narrative and amplifies the importance of visual representation and is an explicit invitation to DC’s Black community, welcoming and prioritizing this audience, which continues to be excluded by the art world. At the same time, conceptual and experimental artists are often viewed as strange or inscrutable. This exhibition is a physical representation that Black conceptual artists are part of the larger Black community, representing themselves, celebrating cultural lineages, and championing collective futures.
Cosmic Garden transports you into the intense green of the SMPTE color bar. These works, with an installation created primarily by Glover, are a physical representation of years of artistic work in a physical space that transcends time and space. Cosmic Garden is the partner exhibition to PRISMMMs, an exhibition at Transformer.
