An Artist Making a Powerful Statement — by Creating Work About Herself
An Artist Making a Powerful Statement — by Creating Work About Herself
For much of her career, Chromati, 26, depicted the naked bodies in her powerful portraits of black women behind protective disguises. Whether they were braiding each other’s hair, defecating or walking along the checkerboard pathways that have become a hallmark of her visual universe, her subjects wore vibrantly colored almond-shaped masks with full lips, wide noses and blank holes for eyes. Such was the case with the figures in her debut show, “BBW” (an acronym for “big beautiful women”), at Platform Gallery in Baltimore in 2016. That exhibition, Chromati wrote at the time, celebrated black women “enjoying life with and without interruptions … just living,” in crisp digital prints collaged with bits of bandanna and Kanekalon synthetic hair. In 2018, a trippy animation of her work appeared on HBO’s groundbreaking late-night show “Random Acts of Flyness.” The short followed the neurotic inner monologue of Princess, a blue-faced character whose appearance changes with each grill she puts in her mouth, as she goes on a quest to calm her jittery heart, bringing her talking, no-nonsense vagina along as a sidekick.
Theresa Chromati’s swirling canvases offer joyful, nuanced depictions of black women and, increasingly, her own inner world.
In her new work, however, the Guyanese-American artist has removed the masks from her figures’ faces and shifted the focus from her community to her own inner world, creating whirlpools of swirling bodies and floating parts — eyes, breasts, legs, fingernails — that together form a reflection of the artist herself. “Once you stop hiding, you find more ease in how you move and how you’ve given yourself permission to understand yourself, to love yourself and to demand love and understanding from others,” Chromati says. “At that point, there’s no reason to have the mask.”
Taken from New York Times Style Magazine.The original article can be seen here.
