Shani Strand: SLIPPERY 4L

SLIPPERY 4L advertises Shani Strand's position as bluntly as a custom license plate or tattoo. But very little about her work is straightforward. She has stated her interest in the sociological concepts of "badness" and ungovernability as they relate to Black diasporic communities, and more specifically, the Jamaican diaspora. SLIPPERY 4L is concerned with the porousness and fluidity of borders, and what Strand has called "an uncertainty of place, an instability of geography." Borders, she notes, are intended to maintain the illusion of a place’s stability, its social, legal and economic sovereignty, and thus to make it governable. As communities in diaspora make clear, such fixity is not only illusory but impossible.

"To be ungovernable, or to be bad," Strand has written, "poses a threat to the reproduction of normativity." She observes that, historically, "badness" was often construed as an affiliation of Black people with demonism, as a way of morally justifying the violence of slavery and colonial oppression. In SLIPPERY 4L, angels and demons recur, as does the traditional Caribbean ghost figure of the duppy and the trickster spider Anansi. Strand has often depicted the duppy as a head in a ski-mask, a hybrid of a Halloween ghost and a masked "badman." As theorists such as Obika Gray have written, since the 1970s a "stylized outlawry" has proliferated among disadvantaged groups in Jamaica–and throughout the diaspora–as a means of "challenging the norm of civility and for affirming a racially charged defiance as a new basis for social identity and honor." Strand’s duppies are both victims and antagonists, therefore; transgressive and honorable, living and dead. Slippery characters indeed.

Slippery too is Anansi, the spider who is known for his cunning and wit, the mischievous antagonist who became a symbol of resistance and survival among enslaved communities. Anansi's web appears in Strand's sculpture 'Cuz it Feels Good, rendered in the metal rebar grill within a painted table. The web, here, is a trap but also a support structure, a home; the artist notes how nationalism and citizenship "are a form of entrapment," a status that attracts and then ensnares its subjects in a system of exploitation and subjugation, enforced by borders. Another rebar work in this exhibition, An Over Representation of Sovereignty, is a functional ladder leant against a wall: an escape strategy from the architectural, aesthetic or philosophical boundaries of the gallery. It offers no real escape, of course. On the other side of the wall is only another part of the gallery, another side of the same coin.

—Jonathan Griffin