New York photographer Lola Flash has created images that show the intersections of politics and identity, history and activism for more than four decades. Now Jenkins Johnson Gallery is celebrating that body of work with \u201cLola Flash: Believable,\u201d an exhibition at its Minnesota Street Project gallery.<\/p>\n
The show, which comes to the Bay Area after presenting the work at Jenkins Johnson\u2019s New York space last year, brings together work spanning her career, offering local audiences a survey of her evolving engagement with identity, activism and image-making.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s and \u201990s, Flash used inverted colors in her \u201cCross Colour\u201d series as part of work documenting the culture around the HIV\/AIDS activist organization ACTUP. This show includes works from that series such as \u201cN is for Native American, Provincetown, Mass\u201d (1993) and \u201cCowgirl\u201d (1994), showcasing the technique, which both heightens the figure and yet obscures much of the subject\u2019s identity and race in the process (dark skin becomes light and light skin becomes dark).<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been pushing against those societal structures through my work,\u201d Flash told the Chronicle.<\/p>\n
In \u201cUnsung Fire Island,\u201d Flash depicts Black and brown residents and visitors of the New York queer enclave Fire Island, exploring how even in so-called LGBTQ communities, people of color still experience racism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Also on view is work from \u201c[Sur]passing,\u201d a series that explores the idea of a \u201cpigmentocracy,\u201d \u201cthe notion of how lighter and darker skin in people of color have historically produced a hierarchy within which people are treated differently even within the larger schemes of racism,\u201d Flash explained.<\/p>\n
Flash\u2019s latest series, \u201csyzygy,\u201d utilizes an Afrofuturist alterego named syzygy, described in the artist statement as a figure \u201cwho wanders visually disparate landscapes united by historical complications with the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and mass incarceration.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw the word \u2018syzygy,\u2019 which means the alignment of three planets, and I thought about the past, the present and the future being those planets,\u201d said Flash.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a perfect comparison for a show that covers the artist\u2019s own different eras.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York photographer Lola Flash has created images that show the intersections of politics and identity, history and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2571,78671,2136,78670,75,84,83,9,24,63,8725],"class_list":["post-197357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-arts-and-exhibits","tag-california","tag-datebook-pick","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}