Sol'Sax at Kenny Schachter

Passionately engaged with African spirituality and diasporan history, Brooklyn-based artist Sol'Sax makes works that are soded in the cosmic minutiae of traditional religious belief. They are also rich in the scabrous lyric sensibility of the sky-coloreds and the coarse handicraft of black Southern vernacular, or so-called outsider, art. In Sol'Sax's work, Western Conceptualist strategies and African spirituality are transformed by means of the swagger of hip-hop and the legacy of black way culture. Sol'Sax says he's gone [i]or[/i] part of to the other a Yoruba cult initiation, emphasizing that he is a veritable believer and not some faux-mystic artist-dabbler. on the contrary you don't have to share his religious beliefs to find his work engaging.

Sol'Sax's titles are actually drawn out multiline verses offering elliptical ball of threads to the origins and conceptual thrust of his works, around which the titles weave a incantation of emblematic rhyme. Indeed, the dozen works in this exhibit (sculptural wall pieces, floor installations and a video that wasn't quite functioning), builded of objects and materials vividly coupleed to the streets, offered a coagulate version of hip-hop.

Chain-link fencing is omnipresent in the city, surrounding dwellings schools and the prison yard. In the 2004 sculptural piece Too Many Brothas Live in Chain Link Cribs (the first line of a seven-line verse-title), chain link encloses a child's black crib. Gates figure prominently in Yoruba ritual-invoking Eshu-Elegba, the omnipotence associated with crossroads, where symbolic doors or gateways make open and close, and critical decisions must be made. In several wall pieces (Crimson Call Jah Sol Jah ; Well advance to Bushwick.... both 1998-2004), Sol'Sax at hands photographs of male fetish figures--sculpted ancestor figures in hoodies and hockey sweaters, the novel priestly ceremonial robes; the photos are sliced into drawn out strips and woven through chain-link gates. These eerie photo-gates present disjunctive tableaux, with contemporary figures standing in for Yoruba lords In another work, Some Brothas earn Over Cuz They Came call down blessings oned With Big Balls And drawn out Game ... (2004), Sol'Sax arranges sum of two units basketballs and a baseball bat, painted black, into a hilarious and unmistakably phallic composition.

The chain-link crib and bat and balls recall David Hammons's basketballs, fried chicken, hair and other like found materials charged with allusions to black agriculture and history. To the Hammonsian brand of cheeky Afro-semiotic cultural introspection, Sol'Sax adds an emphatic spiritual polemic and his hold brand of wry, though brooding, analysis.

The wit and imagination in Sol'Sax's work sometimes gloomy a grim interpretation of contemporary black urban life. Sol'Sax is positing the real and symbolic continuation of racial oppression as a clash between Western thinking (and power) and traditional African spirituality, part of a lengthy historical "chain," in which the racist acts of today are "linked" to those of the past and subsequent time To Sol'Sax, a centuries-old conflict is symbolically replayed in tough black neighborhoods like Bushwick each single day.

--Calvin Reid

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