Vielmetter Los Angeles is happy to current Souled Out, Miami-based artist and former Juxtapoz Clubhouse stalward Reginald O’Neal’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view by means of November 2nd, 2024, the exhibition contains twelve new work increasing on the artist’s richly painted portraits of porcelain souvenirs he initially acquired at a present store in New Orleans.
O’Neal’s shadowy tableaus zero in on collectible figurines of Black musicians, analyzing their varieties and objecthood, and relating them to one another in varied configurations. Painted in lushly layered hues, O’Neal’s works discover a posh and at instances sinister darkness that references an extended historical past in portraiture. The small collectible figurines, principally referred to as sentimental souvenirs, are enlarged within the work, hinting each on the objectification and commodification of Black creativity inside a capitalist system. The objects thus grow to be an emblem of the exploitation of individuals of African descent, representing the historical past of the extraction of cultural manufacturing of music, artwork, spirituality, information, and different types of inventive labor among the many diasporas.
Darkish and mysterious at first look, the works are sometimes void of any further context, the tchotchkes themselves being the focus towards a monochrome background as if on a stage, accompanied by theatrical lighting. Masterfully composed dapples of sunshine counsel a mirrored image on the porcelain or point out a shimmer of a cultured floor. Considered up shut and sometimes monumentalized, (the artist offered a colossal sculpture of 1 figurine The Cellist at Artwork Basel Miami in 2023), the collectible figurines tackle an unsettling and nearly haunting high quality.
O’Neal fastidiously constructs his compositions to counsel totally different interpretations and meanings. A few of the figures are offered individually, in three-quarter views as in conventional portraiture, others ambiguously with their backs turned to the viewer. In Drum Circle, a bunch of collectible figurines is aligned in a sample suggestive of drum circles of enslaved Africans, recalling a darker time in historical past. The portray Misplaced at Sea presents a bunch of figures in a configuration akin to diagrams of how enslaved individuals have been compelled to lie in slave ships. In Backside of the Soulless O’Neal depicts the bottoms of a bunch of 5 haphazardly stacked collectible figurines, emphasizing the hollowness or hollowing out of the spirit of the collectible figurines, underscoring the concept of being stripped of 1’s humanity within the means of commodification. O’Neal’s works reveal a poetic slippage between the objecthood of the collectible figurines and the personhood of the individuals they search to signify.
The collectible figurines even have a direct connection to the politics of the artist’s hometown. Having grown up in Overtown, a traditionally Black space in Miami, O’Neal is conscious about how racial segregation nonetheless percolates at this time. Not that way back, Black musicians and entertainers who carried out in Miami Seashore needed to keep in segregated Overtown; a historical past that frames how the artist views the in any other case generic souvenirs of the musicians. In his work, the reward store mementos grow to be each a metaphor and a name for a better analysis of methods that proceed to take advantage of Black tradition and creativity.
All textual content and imagery courtesy of Vielmetter Los Angeles