How we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global pandemic and a re-awakening to racial injustice, Brenna Youngblood, in her inaugural exhibition at Roberts Projects, mediates her personal associations to these very public events as all of the works in the exhibition comprise a space for both reflection and determined response.

Blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, and speaking directly to the title of the exhibition as a whole, “The LIGHT and the DARK,” i.e., the balance between light and dark, works like INCARCERATION (2020), imply human culpability through the empty hull of a black-and-white striped sweater, the pattern of which is reminiscent of prison uniforms that date back to the 1820s. In this system, prisoners had to remain silent, walk in “lock step” and wear the distinguishing black-and-white stripes, which were meant to suggest the prison bars they lived behind. In Youngblood’s rendition of mixed media, the sweater appears to be trapped within its own incessantly theatricalized and poignant gestural sweep across the canvas, and yet it also appears strangely frozen in space, which further suggests the idea of opposites: of balancing the light with the dark, the good with the bad, the pain with the rapture. The fact that the price tag dangles from the bottom left of the frame in a gesture reminiscent of Rauchenberg’s dirty pillow in his seminal work Canyon (1959), further aligns the idea of prejudice and injustice with commerce.

Brenna Youngblood, Hourglass, 2021, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, photo by Alan Shaffer.

Youngblood’s use of everyday materials, including a pair of her own worn out shoes and an assortment of colorful buttons, constitute a grouping of assembled collage works that allow her to imagine a new-fangled topographical facade which she then enhances through a variety of processes including thick impastos, transparent washes and variously loose and smooth brushstrokes. Hourglass (2021) employs hundreds of black buttons pushed to the very top of the picture plane like small circular creatures, jostling each other to and fro, and desperately trying to come up for air. Metaphorically, this work specifically speaks to notions of disparity, prejudice and social inequality, and one has the sense that these buttons would rather be anywhere else than variously collected in this tightly claustrophobic mélange of darkness. A strange and hapless cloud floats beneath them, and one can’t be sure if the buttons are trying to escape it or are seeking reentry.