Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is honored to exhibit “Sol’Sinner’Sain’t’Sway: Title and Verse,” an intensive solo presentation of work by native Brooklyn artist Pop A. Mr. E, Sol’Sax. The exhibition includes a single (physical) framed print, along with a video projection of the artist performing alongside 12 other selected works from his series of 101 images of “Sol’Sain’t.”
The exhibition is on view from January 10 – January 20, 2024. The reception will take place on January 13, 7pm – 10pm.
A Yale MFA graduate who was a Guggenheim fellow in sculpture, and a recipient of the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sol’Sax has been the subject of national and international group and solo exhibitions, including a solo installation at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, New York. In 2017, he was awarded the Artist in Residence position at Materials for the Arts (NYC Department of Cultural Affairs). With a 30 year exhibition history in New York, much of his practice addresses specific histories and contexts of his multigenerational roots in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Although his work has been included in an exhibit at The Fowler Museum this is set to be the first presentation of work by Sol’Sax in a Los Angeles gallery. The most recent exhibition of works from his Sol’Sain’t series, “The Sol’Sain’t’Sway,” took place at The Bishop Gallery in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York.
The phrase “Sol’Sain’t” names a series of Juneteenth Carnival characters celebrating the cultural icons of the civil rights movement. Unifying iconic images of civil rights leaders with cultural archetypes of Yoruba and other Bantu traditions. The masked figures of this Carnival are performed through a poetic language of puns that simultaneously works between written forms, spoken lines, visual symbols, cultural icons, and ancestral relations. (This poetic language is reflected in how the titles are written, called “Sol’Scrypt” by the artist.) Sol’Sax works through a critical practice of masquerade that synchronizes Yoruba traditions of Egun gun, European Dada movements, Caribbean Carnival and African American global-diasporic influences of Bantu cultures all together as what he refers to as “Bantu Modernism.” Sol’Sax reminds us that “We all have a big racist hole in our head where the history and concepts of Classical Bantu culture should be since the entire global modern art movement has borrowed from Classical Bantu culture.” His work addresses this hole.
Although his practice is initially based in sculpture, Sol’Sax’s work is not contained by any particular medium or technique: his layered compositions of “readymade” images and sounds produce double visions of sacred characters, braiding the various objects, histories, and performances of masquerade encoded or spoken between African(-American) pasts and humanity’s futures. Moving through sculptural, photographic, digital, video, musical, aural, and oral media, his work uncovers or recovers the deeply rooted but often misrecognized presence of African aesthetic traditions in modern and popular cultural currencies circulating on planetary scales.
The single physical Sol’Sain’t work presented in the exhibition, “Sol’Sain’t Fan Elude Hammer Shakin’ John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool So The Hammer That Killed John Henry won’t kill her” (2021), activates a connection between the African-American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and the Yoruba spirit Ogun. Each artwork included in the Sol’Sain’t series is articulated through the initial statement of a singular title-phrase, along with a two-part verse formulated through the call-and-recall structure of African oral traditions. This oral-aural performance of homophones is reflected in the title-and-verse format of the exhibition name as well. The first line is written in Sol’Scrypt, with the following lines flowing from the spectrum of English meanings found in the variety of spellings for the puns alluded to in his writing style:
Sol’Sinner’Sain’t’Sway
Sol’s sinner’s saint’s way
Soul’s innocence way
Souls in a sense sway
Sole sinners aint sway
Soul’s inner sense way
Soul’s inners ain’t sway
Like the multiple lines generated from the single statement that begins the exhibition’s opening verse, an encounter with a single Sol’Sain’t reveals the tangled multitudes of living meanings and generational relations that populate any particular embodiment or iteration of an individual, identity, icon, symbol, or celebrity. Formed as an unusual and intensified encounter with a singular art object, the exhibition’s presentation of one physical work opposite a looping reel of oral performances provides a context where someone is not only approaching or viewing the work, but is directly confronted by an image and the language(s) we use to account for its meanings. These masked portraits are presented not as isolated, one-off individuals, but as extensions, evolutions, and repetitions of collective actions and shared histories.
____
Artist’s Statement on the Artwork
Title:
Sol’Sain’t Fan Elude Hammer Shakin’ John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool So The Hammer That Killed John Henry won’t kill her
Call:
Souls ain’t Fan elude hammer shaking John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool so The Hammer that killed John Henry won’t kill her?
Recall:
Sol’Sain’t Fannie Lou Hammer shake King John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool so The Hammer that killed John Henry won’t kill her!
Sol’Sain’t Fannie Lou Hammer celebrates Fannie Lou Hammer who was a civil rights leader during The Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s as a “Sol’Sain’t”. As a Soul Saint, Fannie Lou Hammer has been synchronized with The African Angel Ogun, The Brass Smith. In the story or parable about Ogun and Oshun and how she became The Brass Smith she uses her feminine power to over come the injustices of patrimony. Ogun as the original Blacksmyth only allowed powerful men to be Blacksmiths, women were kept from learning the lucrative craft of metal work. Oshun’s strategy was to marry Ogun and serve him as a subservient wife. He found her so useful that soon she was helping him forge metal. By serving Ogun she learned to forge metal and became a Ogun The Brassmyth. She spread the knowledge of forging metal to all the other woman. That’s the way Yemoja became a silversmyth and Oya became a coppersmyth.
Fannie Lou Hammer who grew up a sharecropper and worked endlessly to serve the racist patrimony of The Jim Crow South. She served an in-just society that at least served her by teaching her to read and write which gave her the skills to confront those injustices. The Hammer in her name is used in her Sol’Sain’t praise name as a reference not only to Ogun the ancient African Blacksmith but also to John Henry the famous steel driving RailRoad worker who died beating a steam-driver in a race. Fannie Lou Hammer would often sing at civil rights protests, “The hammer that killed John henry won’t kill me”. The song was about the resistance to being worked to death by the injustices of American Racism. Fannie Lou Hammer used her femininity in those protests with a simple statement “Ain’t I a woman” which had even more heft because of the injustice of being sterilized against her will by the Jim Crow medical system. Just like Oshun she still served the Jim Crow society she was married to but her service gave her the skills and the moral authority to change that society and forge it into a more just one not just for her but for all. In the words of Fannie Lou Hammer “Nobody is free until everybody is free” words that echo back to Oshun’s struggle with the patrimony that denied woman freedom in Africa before American Slavery.
….
The Sol’Sain’t Series
The Sol’Sain’t Series is a body of work that I started in 1991. Each Sol’Sain’t started as word play based on the type of oral puns that are a standard part of how ancestors are celebrated in the Yoruba Traditional masquerade called Egun gun. In Yoruba the word Egun gun means ancestors but it also means hidden power. This double meaning pun implies that our ancestral spirits are our hidden power. I use puns with two or more meanings in naming each Sol’Sain’t. One meaning honors the name of the historical African American ancestor and the other meaning alludes to the cultural power they had and how it resonates with Yoruba stories of Orisha and other Bantu African traditions in style and symbol.
In 2013 I started making Dadaist photomontages placing traditional African masks and sculptures in historical portraits of cultural heroes as another way to represent The Sol’Sain’t. In these Dadaist photomontages Traditional African Masks and civil rights Icons are synchronized with Orisha through visual symbolism and verbal puns. The Sol’Sain’t illuminates the links and cultural connections between African American cultures and The Traditional Bantu cultures of Africa. For instance I use the word Dada in relation to these photomontages not only to refer to the European art movement but also to the 15th century prince of the Oyo empire in Nigeria who was called Dada and was famous for choosing to overcome enemies culturally rather than violently. The African American culture soldiers that I celebrate with Sol’Sain’t used the arts as their only tool to resist the violence of European supremacy in the tradition of the original Dada.
….
Sol’Scrypt
Sol’Sain’t like all the titles in this project written in Sol’Scrypt (Sol’s Script) which, is deliberately misspelled English to allude to the multiple meanings found in Sol’Slang Witch (Sol’s Language). Sol’Slang Witch is powered by the magic of A Free Kin, A Merry Kinfolk’s (African American Folks) slang, the spoken or living word. The other mother tongue of English Ebonics can have multiple meanings like the oral Bantu languages our ancestors spoke. Our written English language often has different spelling for words that sound the same to limit the possible meanings that sound could have. In the oral languages of West and central Africa Puns are not accidents or bad jokes, they are a sacred part of the language creating Dadaist “readymade” connections in meaning that the living language seems to form all by itself.
Sol’Sain’t could be written “Sol’s Saint” or “Souls Ain’t”. All the titles of my work are written in Sol’Scrypt, which has at least two meanings and multiple variations. The’Sol’Sain’t title and verse are to be sung and repeated in the Bantu tradition of call and response where subtle variations of spelling and punctuation transform complexly different but related meanings from Sol’Scrypt. The’Sol’Sain’t MainifestSol uses Sol’Scrypt to offer a window into the multiple punned meanings of the manifest.
We all have a big racist hole in our head where the history and concepts of Classical Bantu culture should be since the entire global modern art movement has borrowed from Classical Bantu culture. I am not a Afro Futurist the manifest is a declaration Bantu Modernism. The African future is the future of humanity because all cultures and civilizations are from Africa. The modern and popular arts of the human present are more a reflection of Classical Bantu culture than any of the other Classical Pre Columbian culture including The Classical European culture that sought to eradicate Bantu culture only to be nonviolently overwhelmed by it.
|
Sol’Sax was born in Kings County Hospital in 1969. He earned a BFA with honors from Cooper Union in 1992 and a MFA with honors from Yale School of Art in 1995. Since 1991 the artist has been developing an American ancestral masquerade based on The West African ancestral masquerade called Egun gun. Sol’Sax’s masqueraders are called “Sol’Sain’t” to celebrate the souls that ain’t here no more but live on because of The African cultural retentions they used to resist European supremacist beliefs. Sol’Sax’s work seeks to celebrate The West and Central African cultural contributions that are often overlooked but are deeply rooted in the African American fight for Freedom. Sol’Sax received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 2004. In 2005 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2008 he completed a public commission for MTA arts for transit at The Halsey Street J train station in Bushwick.
{Biographical Text and Statement courtesy of the artist.}
_____
Image: Pop A. Mr. E: Sol’Sax. “Sol’Sain’t Fan Elude Hammer, Shaking The Tool That Killed John Henry The Conqueror, So It Won’t Kill Her.” 2021. Digital Photomontage.
Title:
Sol’Sain’t Fan Elude Hammer Shakin’ John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool So The Hammer That Killed John Henry won’t kill her
Call:
Souls ain’t Fan elude hammer shaking John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool so The Hammer that killed John Henry won’t kill her?
Recall:
Sol’Sain’t Fannie Lou Hammer shake King John Henry The Conqueror’s Tool so The Hammer that killed John Henry won’t kill her!
