Michi Meko, Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground: Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd Fl. 1

4 June - 30 July 2022

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    Kavi Gupta presents Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, a solo exhibition of new work by Michi Meko, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grantee and Artadia Award winner. Featuring works created entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition reflects on Meko’s ideas and experiences during isolation. A forthcoming monograph published by Kavi Gupta Editions will examine all levels of Meko's work, studio methods, and conceptual processes. 

     

    Solitude is a strange currency—enriching to those who can mobilize its potential; a liability to those who cannot. For many of us, the forced isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing feelings of loneliness. When Meko saw the world going into quarantine back in 2020, he decided to embrace the inevitable. Packing a go bag and heading by himself deep into the north Georgia woods, he instigated an isolation within an isolation, and found visibility within invisibility.

     

     

  • “Being Black in the wilderness is an idea I’ve been trying to chase down or play with for a long time,” Meko says. “2020 gave me a green light to just take off and see what that’s like. I wrote a book of field notes and took photographs and made drawings. A lot of it was trying to hear my voice and understand what that meant—to hear one’s own voice in wild spaces. What does a Black man sound like in a wilderness, versus the voice of John Muir or Ernest Hemingway or somebody like that?”

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    Exhibited within a sound and lighting world evocative of a lonesome campfire in the mountains, Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground symbolically and abstractly depicts both the geographical and psychological wildernesses through which Meko has traveled. Some works are painted from the perspective of being inside the thicket. Some are exhibited high up, so the viewer must crane their head. Several are painted from an elevated, expansive vantage point, what Meko describes as a fugitive view, echoing poet Fred Moten’s description of fugitivity as an aspirational striving for a transformative escape from the bondage of the commonplace.

     

    Some of Meko’s works are pure abstractions. Others resemble childlike hump hills, obliterated by mark making. Where the work is less concerned with representation, it engages more with the inward landscape. “That’s what this work is about,” Meko says. 

     

     

  • “Exploring inwardly. Getting into a space of leisure, then once you’re in there, trying to find the calm or transcendent moment where one can hear their voice.”

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    Meko’s rigorous studio practice has always been grounded in a material, metaphorical, and philosophical examination of what he calls “the African American experience of navigating public spaces, particularly in the American South, while remaining buoyant within them.” Incorporating romanticized found objects as well as the visual language of mapping, flags, and wayfinding into his work, he constructs transcendent aesthetic spaces into which the viewer’s psyche is free to wander.

     

    Continuing his longstanding practice of activating the allegorical content of his materials, Meko introduces two new mediums in Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground: fish scales and yellow corn grits. An avid fisherman who makes his own lures, Meko blended the fish scales into his paints, endowing the surfaces of his abstracted landscapes with an otherworldly glint and glitter, like silver moonlight reflecting on an effervescent pond. The yellow corn grits, sourced from a local miller near Rabun Gap, an area where Meko likes to camp, add a coarse and weighty earthiness to the work.

     

    “These gestures are Southern gestures,” Meko says. “What we see now in the art market, where there’s portrait painters, I decided to make my portraits of what Black life looks like and take that into the abstract, and paint what that energy of a Black soul looks like. This is a way to get me where a lot of artists aren’t thinking, and to further isolate myself, to push my aesthetics, my philosophy, or pedagogy further beyond the norm.”

     

    Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta GA; Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA; Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; and Abstraction Today, MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA. His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; King & Spalding, Atlanta, GA; Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles, CA; MetroPark USA Inc., Atlanta, GA; and CW Network, Atlanta, GA, among others. Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize.

     

     

  • Cucka Bugs, or cockleburs, are prickly little things that get stuck to your skin and clothes and hair when you are out in the woods. They are something that sticks with you and travels with you. In this painting, they are representative of a sort of frustration that’s hard to shake. The painting offers a long, desolate view. The feeling of the space is one of coldness and isolation. The fishing line used in the piece is also suggestive of a sort of frustration. On one hand, it evokes thoughts of a celestial map, which could offer a sense of consolation. On the other hand, when there’s fishing line where it doesn’t belong that’s evidence of a mistake. Says Meko, “Frustrations are part of the human condition. They isolate us even when things are going well. In the view of this painting, even though everything is beautiful it still feels lonely."

  • The tassels covering the surface of this work are meant to represent catkins, the squiggly fronds that dangle from oak trees. Catkins are dying “male” flowers that pollinate “female” flowers. In Georgia, there is a pollen season when the squiggly catkins, or “squigs,” are everywhere causing everyone’s allergies to kick up. They look a lot like the fringe in this painting. If you were to lift the tassels in this work you would see that a painting exists underneath, being forever hidden by the tassels, like a clear view of the world blocked by allergy swollen eyes.

     

  • This view from up high through rhododendron leaves evokes a beautiful, free, but uneasy feeling. A fire is burning in the distance below. Something is lingering there. As in many of Meko’s paintings, this piece includes fishing line. “Whenever fishing lines are present they represent pressures that pull on us, or some sort of mistake or failure that has to be corrected,” Meko says. “That’s the evidence of someone’s frustration.” Within the picture plane, such feelings have the chance to be perceived also as things of beauty, suggesting that the materials and echoes of frustrations can be transformed.

  • With some humor in the title, this piece is an homage from the artist to the crappie fish. The work includes the actual scales from a descaled crappie. The coloration at the top of the image is meant to evoke the color world of the crappie’s scales. The 4lb Mr Crappie Hi Viz Mono lament used in the painting is the fishing line Meko uses to fish for crappie. The painting sits atop two containers of corn grits. For Meko, the work is about the concept of taking a life to sustain a life. “When you take a fish’s life, you can feel the energy go out of it,” Meko says. “I began to wonder, where does that energy go? Does it go to me? Does it go to the heavens? Which is why this painting has a heavenly look as well. And the scales of course have to go away, which is why they are in this painting.” Each container of grits is dated in between the present day and the beginning of the pandemic. This gesture again is about thinking through what it means to take a life, and what it takes to sustain a life. “It’s my thank you to that fish for teaching me that,” Meko says.

  • This painting was inspired by a panic attack Meko experienced in the woods as a storm materialized on the horizon. “I realized I was too far in to turn back,” Meko says. Even though he was materially prepared for a storm, the anxiety caused by the gathering clouds made him lose touch with his intellect. The clouds begin to look like brain stems, which triggered bigger emotions, making him perceive more clouds, and more brain stems rushing in. The feeling created a sense of danger and an awareness that death is certain. At that moment, Meko sat by a tree and took out some M&Ms, and crushed some up to spread on the ground to attract ants. “I had this thought that if I died, the ants could eat my body and someone would find a skeleton with a hat on,” Meko says. “That’s representative of me having that moment when intelligence fails. It’s a heavy one but a funny one at the same time.”

  • The title of this painting references a book by James Baldwin, which itself references the Biblical quote, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.” The view in the painting is from the midst of charred woods. Everything is vacant; fire has gone through. The image references a moment of epiphany Meko had while camping during the social justice protests in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “While I was sitting by my own fire, the rest of the world was on fire,” Meko says. “There was a real moment of guilt that I have absolutely checked out or taken some kind of privilege to put myself in this space and enjoy this leisurely moment of what I call caveman HD, which is a campfire. It’s not having a care in the world but then being aware of what’s going on within the distance.”