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edibition reviews ARTEFACTS OF MEMORY: The Sculptures of Leonardo Drew Okwui Enwezor Much contemporary debate on the material production of art has centered so much around the demise of painting's hegemonic grip as the preeminent "fine" art form, that we are hardly allowed enough access to forms of art that rely on less traditional means for art production If one were to take postmodernism to its logical conclusion, then the time could not be more auspicious for exploring different notions of art making with materials divested of the scent of commodity, so prevalent in the many efforts of the over-hyped eighties It is perhaps ironic that Leonardo Drew's elegiac installations concurrently showing at Barbara Toll Gallery, and Thread Waxing Space, should utilize a material (raw cotton canvas) that has been the province of painting But in a decidedly divergent form and configuratiorl But also without the postmodernist penchant for wild and futile forays into the realms of conceptualism His, is an art of an entirely different nature: subtle, lowkey , with a persistent hum tuned to the cadence of a vague yet familiar music Drew is an artist who in the past made sculptures with bales of raw unprocessed cotton - a loaded material in American history In those works he was able to memorialize both the concrete and the inarticulable On one hand the concrete evidence of slavery's dehumanizing and degrading barbarity was negotiated via its most innocent yet harrowing signifier: cotton Still, the plausibility of unearthing the atavism that gave birth to such barbarity remained a difficult cipher to decode, for memory is also given to flux , disintegration, decay, and oxidization And if the metaphor of decay and dissolution is one form of losing to history and memory horrible events wrought on human conciousness , then Drew's intent seemed more like an intervention - to arrest them through the process of retrieval from the dumpsters and landfills of amnesia Thus recovered,the materials in their degraded and eroded state give off an aura of the exhumed awaiting further forensic tests By employing cotton as the official data for this interrogation of history and our abilities tc recall, and also as a biographical signifier of oppression and coercion; of racism and its debilitating consequences on our body politic, it appeared Drew casted his gaze, not just on the oppressed, but more importantly on the oppressor Not as a ruse to reactivate "ancient history", but instead to explore how the past manifests and informs present history, particularly one that not only still prioritizes the weapons of fear and coercion, but also against difference It is against the background of such information, one comes to Drew's present set of exhibitions Though more muted and abstract, his concerns - in terms of narrative and structure - have not shifted much from those earlier concerns Though their moorings are not so evidently set in their referencing of America's racial past In fact. they seem to have metamorphosed into a more rigorous and complex vision The works in these two shows have retained elements of the process of their making They have been made by burning, twisting, and gathering disparate materials into conclusive wholes For the purposes of placing Drew's oeuvre in perspective, it might seem pertinent to view his work like many critics have done, in relation to such luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, Janis Kounellis, and Anselm Kiefer, but these are essentially surface relations After the initial assessment the similarities largely disintegrate The artist in response to such comparisons has commented that " it is the weight of the subject" not content that unites his work with those of the aforementioned artists Though the formal structure of his art can in some way or other be linked to those artists, it is my believe that their concerns do not necessarily essay his So instead, I draw my comparison with his work to the likes of Glenn Ligon, not only in relation to subject matter, but also in the usage of material This is most evident in Ligon's "Untitled (I do not always feel colored)" with its strong-headed, repetitive block of text that dissolves into a quiescent ground of...

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