BEAUTIFUL PROXY

 

By Greg Rideout

Going into Lump Gallery on the last day of “BEAUTIFUL PROXY”, a one-woman show by mixed media artist Jasmine Best, reminded me why I started looking at art all those years ago. I like being surprised and alarmed. I like feeling that I’m seeing something different, works that push up under the normal to twist me and pull me into new thoughts.

 

Here, with Jasmine Best, I’m seeing the artist’s life in complicated nuances as she seeks her footing in place and time. There’s sad beauty in “Mouth Piece”, a collaged fabric and digital painting that’s a flag-like anthem for suffering and inclusion. It’s somehow angry and hopeful at the same time. Its colorful composition directly confronts us, and the anxious young woman portrayed points her accusing silence directly at you.

 

The enigmatic “Self Portrait 2020 Check In”, so lovingly layered and composed, gives us a glimpse of Best’s own story and asks us to check on ours. What is true and what is false about the narrative we’ve created for our selves and others? It’s a gift to be asked such questions.

 

Best’s works spring from being Black and female in predominantly white Southern spaces. She confronts that space and each of us with her “A Wilmington Doll”  -- a color video in which a Black female in blonde wig and blue contacts holds a white doll painted black.  The video portrait stares, daring and angry and brave. The narration –repeated again and again – flatly intones “all the world had agreed” that blue and white were desirable above all else. The work reminds us of the almost impossible task of repairing the evil damage wrought on all by white supremacy.

 

I hope you will go to Best’s website to see the pieces.  And look for other shows of her work. Perhaps you’ll see how she handles the placement of Black female bodies in our society, where they are expected to work and labor. She does with the gouache and digital prints of  “American Weeds Growing Through Docile Garden (Nubian Queen)” and “American Green Growing Through Docile Garden (Uppity).” With these and other works, Best constructs what good art does at times – gives us a window into others and ourselves.