PLAY MORE WORK LESS

Group Exhibition

June 10 - August 21, 2022

OPENING EVENT: Friday, June 10 | 5 - 9 PM

PLAY MORE WORK LESS explores the purpose of play as a noun and a verb. Play connotes leisure, creativity, wonder, humor, experimentation, and joy. It also bears a relationship to action, effort, and performance as well as sociopolitical critique. Through installation, augmented reality, painting, printmaking, and interactive sculpture, the artists featured in this exhibition approach play as a medium in itself. 

Peter Williams and Patricia Renee Thomas explore the relationship between color and creativity. While both artists regularly deploy dark humor in their paintings to interrogate the persistence of racial and gender stereotypes, the works on view in PLAY MORE WORK LESS use play to different ends. Known for large-scale compositions that combine figuration with abstraction, Williams’s color field paintings represent an exercise in pure form. During the pandemic before his untimely passing, the artist turned to color studies to push the boundaries of his creativity while also delighting in simplicity. Though more abstract than the work Williams typically made, these canvases feature two of his most recognizable mainstays, namely bold color and complex patterning. Thomas is likewise drawn to bold colors such as hot pinks, emerald greens, and glossy blacks, and her scene of play brings together hopscotch and three sisters. Made specifically for this exhibition, the painting serves as a commentary on Black girlhood and the great outdoors. The bold colors and strange creatures in Simphiwe Ndzube’s work on the façade of the museum amplify these themes, creating a through line within and beyond the white walls of the gallery.

In addition to painting, many of the works in PLAY MORE WORK LESS focus on new media and interactivity as well as questions of access and equity. Kelli Williams’ installation enfolds animation and augmented reality into portraiture to bring the everyday routines and self-fashioning practices of young Black women to life. As a visual and community artist, Williams often uses experimental animation, photography, installation, and humor to challenge cultural, racial, and gender norms that emanate from social media and technology. Artist, writer, and musician Devin Kenny is also interested in the limits and possibilities of interactive media and the role that technology and online environments play in our everyday lives. The works in this exhibition invite viewers to consider the promises and pitfalls of facial recognition technology by donning a translucent mask and to imagine new uses for outmoded mediums such as VHS tapes. 

Jennifer Mack Watkins’ series of prints envision play as a formative attribute of both childhood and adulthood. Watkins’s print series is named after a 1920s children’s periodical that sociologist and organizer W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered to publicize positive imagery of African-American life. These works remind us that play can induce joy and excitement as well as loss and nostalgia. 

In considering the multivalent purposes of play, this exhibition engages art and creativity in out-of-the-box ways. Each work asks viewers to think carefully about who in our society has the time and resources to play as well as how play reflects and transmits cultural values. In so doing, the works implicitly address how Black labor, ingenuity, and invention have been historically devalued yet also desired and consumed at a global scale. Play, in this frame, provokes new understandings of our world. 

Curated by Tiffany Barber, TDC Curator-in-Residence

Carole Bieber & Marc Ham Gallery

VIRTUAL GALLERY TOUR

Photo Credit: Dan Jackson