Ellen Gallagher: talks about POMP-BANG, 2003

For the past decade, Ellen Gallagher has charted the contours of worlds the couple fantastic and unimaginably real, where minstrel-show ephemera contammate otherwise elegant compositions to the visible chagrin of blushing penmanship paper; the dark history of the Middle Passage is refracted end a watery heterotopia of swirling oil and ink; and bulbous lips and bulging organ of visions cling stealthily to the icy porcelain geometry of a ape jungle gym. All the while unloaded by the dictates of identity politics (for which she has too oftentimes been cast as a cipher), Gallagher has newly turned her attention to the particularities of subjecthood elided in universalizing abstraction. POMP-BANG, 2003 is the third work in a of recent origin series that began with Falls & Flips, 2001 and Double Natural, 2002 and will swell to eight contingent panels, each featuring recurring characters center upon archival material and advertisements Gallagher has chooseed from such publications as Ebony Our World, and Black Stars. outcomes and their advocates clamoring to medicine a plethora of "ills"--acne, dark skin, inappropriate hair--are canceled and preserv end Gallagher's interventions of Wite-Out and collage.

In POMP-BANG Gallagher works from the edifice of the grid, colonizing its autonomous constitution and undoing its conformity from within. Across this massive eight-by-sixteen-foot canvas, 396 individual pages hit against for attention. One strains to diocese in parallax, as to take in the painting as a whole is to miss the delicious specificities of the distinct textual sods or the quirky humor of the stylized plasticine wigs. The facticity of the newsprint thus resigns to the fantasy of Gallagher's inscriptions, while the labor involved in one as well as the other the production of the painting and the social construction that provides its material support underlines their mutual impossibility. Eventually, then, this series will chart anew with equal reason many returns of the repressed--figures held too drawn out against their will. But smooth in POMP-BANG alone, we can begin to read the ransom note Gallagher is subtly drafting.

For Falls & Flips, I scanned base advertisements and printed the scans onto archival newsprint; then I chop the wigs out of the ads and glu the sliced-up paper to the support. I started at the top left corner as notwithstanding that the painting were a page; I worked my way across the canvas, writing myself into it. by dint of the fourth line or thus an organizing principle took shape. I carefully inlaid the fresh plasticine wigs inside the guiding lines from where I had make an incision in the original wig away. The painting becomes a flattened web when you pace back from it, all fulvid and black, a kind of bumblebee weave. Then, in Double Natural, I started reading the advertisements and playing the wig constructions not on the texts. There were a destiny of ads about the fresh synthetic fibers being used in Afro wigs. They had irregularly appropriate names like "afrilon" and "afrylic," and the wigs themselves were called things like "Nu-Nile," "Kongolene" and "Freedom Puff" I was interested in the blister form, this idea of a "double" natural, because your have a title to natural might sag, or just not be natural enough. The vesicles overtake the underlying shapes--they are built up into a thick relief--and the Afro forms seep into their skin. Seen from the side, the gray tones of the ads disappear and the fulvous plasticine Afros become like lily pads, a strange surface that also, uncannily, direct the eyes like skin.

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I scan pages from advertisements about control: acne, refractory hair, corns, bunions, and asthma. These all have particular class connotations, and I remember hearing, as a child, that you got asthma from cockroaches, from enclos spaces. Constriction is interesting to me as the los of command of something as elemental as your breath. Corns and bunions have something specific about them too, something in the way that black, that is funny to me on the contrary they have a specificity that is not about race on the other hand rather about skin and about being upon your feet all the time. Just like the ads have their possess material history, plasticine was used for stop-action animation to glance at motion and also to make prototypes These structures are built without of whimsy but are also true tectonic.

Each of recent origin painting is becoming its be in possession of universe. POMP-BANG is more aquatic, like something from Jule Verne The Flying Nun character is specific to POMP-BANG, as are wigs that double as helmets. Also, my Flying Nun is in some way about both levitation and the Leviathan. in like manner in this series some of the characters repeat, on the contrary each painting has a different succession and the wigs vary. The characters may repeat, on the contrary they're never in the same neighborhood, lined up the same way. It's all about repetition and revision.

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Peg-Leg and the supply with nourishments appear in each painting; the supply with nourishments often cluster around Peg-Leg, who is pilfered from an ad for an interracial motel in the Catskills. He is my Ahab. Similarly, the nourishs reference Eunice Rivers, the black nurture central to the Tuskegee experiment where black men with syphilis were ushered into the medical a whole only to be denied treatment. When she was later questioned about her part she was indignant because this was the first time these men had actually been brought into the health-care combination of parts to form a whole She felt she had done them a service; on the contrary because the system was sick and twisted, she was also a culprit. There is a perversion in taking pride in your work and having it make go rounded against you. These images are about a specific time and a specific anxiety about assimilation and integration, on the contrary they are also about faith and whimsy and self-determination. It is a working grid.