Artist
Shaunté Gates
Title
Powerline
Date2015
MediumAcrylic paint and photograph on linen
Dimensions38 x 48 in. (96.5 x 121.9 cm)
Object numberDCCAH2024.074
ClassificationsPaintings
Locations
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (200 I Street SE)
Description“Powerline” is a part of the body of work “Land of Myth” which considers the terrain of the DC housing project where Gates grew up. This work is a line of inquiry informed by Gates’ exploration of the 1988 documentary series “Joseph Campbell and The Power Of Myth”, residential segregation, and the many myths that have derived from the constructs of education, race, class, and the connection to self needed to navigate them. His interventions with collage, painting, and more simultaneously serve as the narrative and spiritual foundation—a site of undoing and new non-linear possibility where the past, present, dreams, and reality all collide and coalesce into one another. As the landscape of Gates’ dreamscapes flows through his process of building layers of photo, text, and paint, the figure too navigates its way through the labyrinth of norms and narrative placed upon them by outside forces through policy, history, and mass media. Drawn together, the series seeks to examine the story itself—its construction, its power, and what we believe in as a result of its presence and dominance, and whether a new story is needed and possible.
Nate Langston Palmer
