February 22nd – April 13th 2024
No Gallery, New York
“Although the works in the exhibition make use of the aesthetics of hip hop culture as their dominant point of reference, the show isn’t really about hip hop music itself, but primarily uses it as a vehicle to open up a dialogue around peoples proclivity towards the consumption of things they don’t fully understand, often out of a reluctance to accept the reality that produced said thing, as well as touching on other universal and inescapable topics, like masculinity, pride, mental health, posturing, incarceration, cultural exchange, censorship and social programming, dissecting rap culture as a bi-product of the the intersection of all of the for-mentioned themes.
A foundational reference for what became this body of work, is what’s known as a “switch”, an illegal black-market attachment for Glock handguns that when attached, converts them into fully automatic weapons. Its name appears frequently in the lyrics of many street rap songs. My fascination with it stemmed, in part, from the fact that most people have no idea what it even is, and couldn’t tell you what it was even from looking at it, but this object that’s no larger than a quarter, could land you in prison for close to a decade if you’re unlucky enough to be caught with one. That kind of sentencing, and much of policing and punishment is predicated on the “potential” to cause harm, instead of actual harm caused.
Rap music because of its “potential” to harm, like other mediums, has battled with censorship. A battle for its right to exist. The larger installation of this project is a set of images of rappers, juxtaposed against censored versions of those same images. Compiling these images I couldn’t help but think of how some of these rappers have reputations of being genuinely terrible people, that are complicit in the reproduction of harmful elements of our culture. But does just covering them up, and blurring them out, make consuming their work ok? Can we condemn the actions of the producer while still supporting their production? I try to think about my own role in reproducing harmful ideas. The piece titled “Self Portrait”, containing a ski mask stretched over a bag of powdered sugar, comes from when I used to wear ski masks to try and look “tough”, unapproachable. Until one time someone came right up to me and felt at ease talking to me because of my soft, even sweet eyes (their words not mine) . Begging the question, what in me made me want to intimidate others in the first place? Maybe it’s a defense mechanism?
The exhibition title itself comes from the Cities Aviv track “To Dream of Smoke”, opening with a monologue describing a fictional character, “Joshua”, that is meant to encompass all the different black boys who resort to less-than-legal means of advancing their position in society, at an attempt to re-humanize the perception young black men in the street, the very peoples that hip hop itself came from.
This theme is exemplified by the presence in the show of Tay K, a then teen rapper that rose to internet fame with his viral music video “The Race”, shot while on the run for capital murder charges. He was Painted as a boogie man in the media, and teenage me believed it. Till I learned his story, born into a cycle of violence and struggle that I’ve seen claim many kids I grew up with. A hard to escape cycle that sets you up to fail from day one. How much can we judge the actions of a child fighting for survival, what if instead of just punishing him, we punished the society that failed him? The installation features one of his first pictures from jail at the start of his 55 year sentence; the post sat at 1 million likes, next to an image of the platinum certification for his song having sold a million copies. It begs the question how many people that pressed play even knew anything about him, and if they did, did they even care?”
– Allen-Golder Carpenter
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An alternative title I had played with for this piece was “who owns your masters?”, for those who don’t know, “masters” are the original recording from which all copies of the artists music are made, and are a prime point of leverage for control over an artists career. And also a particular point of contention in the Rap genre, due to many artists getting trapped in predatory record contracts often due to lack of legal literacy. Touching a historical precedent of exploitation of black artists. The word master also brings to mind the master-servant/slave dynamic. But due to the internet era many of these music artists have been able to find significant success independently. Upending the age old power dynamic and reframing who the “master” is allowed to be
Interestingly enough rap has a phenomenon of artist run labels, where artists now have the power to inflict the harm of a master onto other artists, when in all likelihood the artist that owns their own label is likely signed to a larger label, or even yet another artist. Creating and reproducing this hierarchical harm structure
The question remains, who owns your masters? Who is your master? Who owns them?
[Content warning: Self Harm] This work is titled after the song “I Choose Violence” by Atlanta rapper Glokk40spaz, who is pictured throughout the work, a lot of rap music when people think of its they think of a certain hyper aggressive, hyper violent outward face of the artists in the music. That aggression doesn’t come from no where.
When you read between the lines you can catch passing glimpses into how some of people truly feel deep down. In the song this piece is named after, in between the usual fare of this kind of music, the artists says “ I used to cut my self because I felt worthless” then just as quickly moves on to the next line to complete the bar.
In our society and especially the black community and amongst black men, metal health is a bit of strained topic to say the least, and the lack of support and lack of identification of certain issues is very real, especially being that self harm is less associated with young men. Looking back at my teen years, now on the other side of a long healing journey, only in recent years that I realized the issues I had, like an eating disorder, and body dysmorphia, learning to enjoy the sensation of hunger to be a thin as possible, because I too, felt worthless. Which is where the bathroom scale in the work comes from, juxtaposed against digital scale often used for weighing drugs, in reference to the music of glokk40spaz.
Before you judge the violent nature of the music, remember that irritability and short temperedness is one of the least recognized symptoms of depression.
Take care of your brother, you never know how much they might need it
When someone gets locked up it takes something from them, and from the ones around them that you never quite get back, the prison industrial complex is something that’s touched my life in ways I won’t share, but I probably couldn’t name one person at least of color that I know who’s life it hasn’t touched in some way
This work is a double sided assemblage of inmate property inventory bags, in short, the bags they put your possessions in when they lock you up.
On the front in each bag there is a section of a photograph of Tay K, posted at the beginning of his 55 year sentence started at about 16 years old, along with a piece of a shredded shirt and a handful of shattered glass, a part of this comes from the Gil Scott heron song “pieces of a man”. The shredded shirt and glass alludes to the idea of a person coming to pieces, as they get chewed up and dispersed within the system. and in order to fully reclaim your self all of these bags must be unpacked, and even then all the pieces can never be fully reassembled, at least not in the way they were before, but there lies the potential for something new, and even beautiful to emerge.
Glock switch
A inmate inventory bag containing a replica Glock handgun and a stack of screen captures of the Boondocks episode, The Story of Gangstalicious pt.2, where fictional rap superstar is outted as homosexual, resulting in the downfall of his career, falling victim to the social dogmas of hip hop and namely American culture of the 2000’s
The replica Glock being a part of a cut installation idea that involved it being mounted it on the back wall of the gallery
The work is hidden with the gallery as an allusion to people’s inability to contend with ideas they deem “offensive”, hiding parts of ourselves for social acceptance and security, intersecting hip hop cultures issues with homophobia as a reflection of greater society. The irony being that before being outted the character had a successful clothing line of very feminine clothing for men, including skirts and pearl necklaces, and only was after he was discovered to be gay, were these aesthetics considered unacceptable.