Rashid Johnson: New Growth

Ballroom Marfa is proud to announce the opening of New Growth, a solo exhibition of new work by Rashid Johnson on March 8. Johnson combines both personally and historically loaded material–such as shea butter and black soap–with LP covers and books in complex paintings, sculptures and installations that confound the uniformity of collective identity and multicultural representation. Beginning with the question, “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?” New Growth‘s playful scrutiny intertwines cosmology, escapism and irrigation in a re-contextualization of the lines between past, present and future in a desert setting.

The physical manipulation of biomaterial into an abstract, aestheticized form is a concept that runs through the work on display, with references to the ongoing transformation and rehabilitation of bodies, landscapes and the identities embedded within them. This plays out most dramatically in the outdoor installation in which the sun-baked gravel of the gallery courtyard is irrigated with shea butter: the terraforming of Arrakis played out in miniature here in the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas.

In keeping with Ballroom Marfa’s mission, New Growth features newly commissioned work including the video Samuel in Space and the Shea Butter Irrigation System–both of which were produced during the artist’s stay in Marfa. Works in wax, burned wood, tile and mirror, as well as brass chairs, woods chairs and rugs round out the exhibition.

A film program curated by Rashid Johnson in collaboration with MoMA film curator Josh Siegel will run throughout the exhibition. This program will feature Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song(1971), John Coney and Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (1974) and John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984) as well as a night of short films.