Dana Robinson, I’ll Tell You This For Free
April 1-30, 2022
On display at Spellerberg Projects from April 1st to April 30th, I’ll Tell You This for Free featured six works exemplary of Dana Robinson’s practice. Four works on panel from her Ebony Reprinted series embody Robinson’s commentary on the role that visual media plays in promoting impossible standards for Black excellence, which have been molded by white-dominated social calibers and have substituted the extraordinary with the bare minimum.
Using vintage Black media from Ebony Magazine as source material, Robinson uses transparencies to trace and transfer the images in paint onto wood panels. The fragmentation of the figures that occur in the monoprint process shatters the stylization of the figures in their original commercial context, cracking the enforced standard of Black excellence that such publications advertise, to reveal nuanced emotions that more accurately reflect the Black experience in the United States.
The two works in silk speak to Robinson’s dichotomous experience as a Black woman by teetering on the tension between permanence and ephemerality. The saturation and potency of the dye assert a sternness upon the delicate fabric, while the semitransparent quality of the silk threatens the subject’s visibility as it accommodates light fluctuations and other features present in their surroundings. Like the paintings, Robinson’s Blackness makes her hypervisible in most environments, while her identity as a woman subjects her to passive social stereotypes that expect women to fade into the background. By teasing one’s ability to view the work clearly, Robinson incorporates the viewing space as an integral component to the work and encourages viewers to consider the multitudes of the space and the Self.
Photographs by Laurel Coyle