Anxious Audience
On view until 5 January 2020
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, at Harbourfront Centre
Toronto, Ontario
www.thepowerplant.org
Rashid Johnson’s “Anxious Audience” marks his first solo presentation in Canada with a monumental site-specific commission for The Power Plant’s Clerestory. These works are a continuation of Johnson’s series known as Anxious Audiences and a product of what Johnson has referred to as “drawing through erasure”, in which digging and scratching reveals faces within thickly layered black surfaces. The exhibition envelops us within a powerful work that raises questions about solidarity, identity and memory in our societies. Accompanied by tropical plants reaching for the sunlight above, the installation ponders our resilience in an increasingly polarized world.
Image: Rashid Johnson, Untitled (Microphone Sculpture), 2018. Bronze panel, ceramic tile, mirror tile, animal skin, books, shea butter, ceramics, plant, oil stick, black soap, wax. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Martin Parsekian.
