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Plural

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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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Review


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


“Unearthing Unicorns,” the recent tapestry exhibition by artist Simone Elizabeth Saunders, reimagines the captivity narrative of the _Unicorn Tapestries_ (1495–1505), in part. Held at The Met Cloisters in New York City, the medieval tapestries depict a unicorn captured by 12 hunters, who then hold the creature in curious observation. As the archetypal symbol of rarity, the unicorn is often positioned as a figure that subverts set standards of normalcy. A panel from the medieval tapestries depicts the unicorn lying inside of a fenced-in patch of a fecund meadow. On a trip to the Cloisters, Saunders was both mesmerized by the beautifully woven story of the unicorn and compelled by a desire to set the unicorn free. 

While the original artist of the medieval tapestries remains unknown, its opaque origin story has given way to widely varied interpretations of the series. In “Unearthing Unicorns,” Saunders derives a more liberatory narrative from the source material. _Release in Darkness_ (2022), Saunders’s first panel, introduces Verchü (the phonetic spelling for “virtue”) as the unicorn’s Black femme companion. Verchü wears a dashiki peppered with bright orange and yellow shapes, with her hair wrapped above her head. Pictured alongside the mythical unicorn (whose name is capitalized in the exhibition as Unicorn), she invokes an Aphrodite-like warrior deity. In direct contrast to the original series’ wide perspective, Saunders’s panel presents both figures in an intimate profile.

Often inspired by iconography, Saunders’s process involves sketching digitally rendered drawings by hand. She then projects the image onto muslin and begins manually tufting and punch needling acrylic and wool thread to carefully bring her drawings to life. Typically used in crochet work, acrylic thread elevates the tapestries into glossy, banner-like images. This prominent display complements Saunders’s alignment of Verchü with the Unicorn. If Western mythos understands figures of the unicorn, or of Black femininity, in terms of subjugation, Saunders’s tapestries insist upon their narrative liberation, as the two begin a journey toward freedom beneath a velvety tufted sky of starry indigo. 

_Break Away at Dawn_ (2023) demonstrates Saunders’s central liberation narrative. Verchü rides on the back of the Unicorn in a strapless pink gown, hair loose and no longer wrapped. The daytime sky is ablaze with refreshing yellows and oranges, while the meadow is overgrown with wildflowers. Dogs nip at their heels and follow, mouths open, adding drama to their exit. The Unicorn’s broken shackles fall from Verchü’s out-stretched hands. In the next panel, _Affirmations of the Day_ (2023), Verchü and the Unicorn pause at a waterfall for a moment of rest. Verchü bathes the Unicorn, as birds and other wildlife emerge. The fauna motif is also echoed in _Harmony Sings at Dusk_ (2023), where Verchü finds comfort and rest under the Unicorn’s bowed head, as the two are surrounded by animal and plant life. This composition is amplified by a purple horizon. Verchü’s hair is full and free when she leans into the Unicorn, who is now rendered in an amber colour and fortified by their new calming home. 

“Unearthing Unicorns” also includes Saunders’s 2021 tapestry series, _The Four Queens_. Inspired by _Precious Stones_ (1900), Alphonse Mucha’s lithograph series, Saunders continues her examination of iconic archetypal figures. The facial expressions across _The Four Queens_ showcase Saunders’s refined attention to detail. Reminiscent of Emory Douglas’s radical Black Panther Party posters of the ’60s and ’70s, which used the aesthetics of propaganda in political celebration of Black people, each of Saunders’s tapestries have one of the following phrases stitched into the bottom portion: Black Power, Black Dreams, Black Magic, and Black Love. Here, Saunders also employs the tufting gun and punch needle to portray her subjects’ embodied gestures and emotive dispositions that recall bell hooks’s oppositional gaze. Across these tapestries, Saunders’s signature detail of lush colour gradients results in bold luminous portraits of Black women and femmes. 

Working within the legacy of Black feminist revision, Saunders carefully rearranges the same art-historical tropes that elide Black women with captivity, through the emblematic proxy of the unicorn. Viewers of this work will be challenged to elevate their conceptualizations of hierarchical standards of identity, and certainly beauty, and instead consider the magical sensibility found in escape. 

Writer

This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

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“Unearthing Unicorns” ran from 17 March to 13 May, 2023 at Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.


“Unearthing Unicorns” — Simone Elizabeth Saunders

Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu is an artist and writer based in Nanjing and Toronto.

Neighbouring Libya and Niger, Tassili n’Ajjer, translated by the exhibition wall text as the “once fertile plateau of rivers,” is now a cultural heritage site with rock formations featuring numerous prehistoric cave drawings. Depicting Tassili n’Ajjer’s landscape and prehistoric art, Lydia Ourahmane’s 47-minute film _Tassili_ (2022) follows the homecoming of a rock that the artist picked up from the site on a scouting trip prior to filming. As the film plays on a loop in Mercer Union’s gallery space turned viewing room, animated 3-D reconstructions of this rock accompany a musical exquisite corpse composed by musicians Nicolás Jaar, felicita, Yawning Portal, and Sega Bodega. 

As a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site, Tassili’s monumentality invokes the persistence of ancient objects and cultural otherness, even as these descriptors are themselves fickle and incredibly precarious. The cosmopolitanism of monument management organizations like UNESCO has given rise to the hyper-monumental, where memories specific to a culture are othered, mystified, preemptively fossilized and made into a simulation of themselves, under the assumption of universality. Aware of Tassili’s losing race against time as cave drawings wither and water sources deplete, precarity and urgency underlay the making of the film. Due to political tensions with neighbouring countries, to gain access to the site, Ourahmane and a team of international collaborators had to obtain visas and follow government-approved routes, relying on local Tuareg guides. 

Ourahmane’s representation of Tassili is in conversation with the long history of photographic documentation of the site, where the forceful penetration of a camera’s gaze is imbricated with France’s archeological pilfering of Tassili. Monumentality’s key feature is its commemoration of a specific community. The global visibility that comes with being declared a World Heritage site, and Tassili’s history of archeological treatment, reduces the site and the people who live there as exotic, static, and dead. The hyper-monumental cannot conceive of Tassili as a living entity that actively co-produces meaning with its viewers—meanings that are subject to ongoing re-evaluation. 

In Ourahmane’s animation, the rock wanders in an other(ed)world in which language edges on ecstatic incomprehension. There is a moment in the film where the camera lens inches forward in between dark, chilling crevices of rock formations, refusing a viewer’s gaze and invoking an elusive and uninviting spiritual guardianship against being seen. In this way, the film resists comprehension mediated by language, as the ecological perturbs the syntactical. Edward Said, in his essay “Reflections on Exile” (1984), ponders, “We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy.” In _Tassili_, the risk of withering cave drawings raises perplexing questions about life-governing rules (like that of the hyper-monument) sedimented through language, and the contradictory act of preservation. 

Lurking just beyond the frame, the terror of military drones instigated by the hyper-legalization and surveillance of Tassili buzzes incessantly in the background. But as the light dawns, the viewer is also generously granted the sublimity of Tassili’s awe-inspiring landscape and rock art, decidedly in the foreground of the film—a sight transcending relentless linguistic contextualization. Rock emerges from earth as magma solidifies into continental crusts, before destabilizing and dispersing. This is a process both other to and preceding the human, repeatedly grounding and ungrounding our environments and cultures. The rock’s psychedelic returns mediated by the film bring to mind a question Said poses in “Reflections on Exile”: “What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it, more or less forever?” The temporality of rock alludes to a time before naturalized forms of socio-political organization such as the nation state. While socially accepted truths like the hyper-monument are reiterated through language, repetition opens up the chance of fissures, introducing productive crises in meaning-making. 

Entangled in the tension between preservation and ruin, _Tassili_ sheds light on what would be sights otherwise unseen for global audiences. The film takes moving image as an interrogative tool to rigorously confront the political dimension of its monumentality, grappling with the forces that enable and disable movements through the site. The rock’s displacement and subsequent return have been shown in Paris, Algiers, New York, Tunis, and Toronto. _Tassili_’s minimal use of written and spoken language (the only instance is in the ending credits) enables a cultural translatability, without reductive universalization across borders. Travelling to audiences of vast geographical differences, _Tassili_’s depiction of sedimentation—linguistic and otherwise—evokes a yearning to be of a place, and the ability to relate to the world as we don’t know it. 


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_Tassili_ ran from 28 January to 15 April, 2023 at Mercer Union, Toronto.



Tassili — Lydia Ourahmane