PRESS RELEASE
NO GYAL CAN TEST
SEPTEMBER 24 – NOVEMBER 15, 2020
RED BULL ARTS, NEW YORK
Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test is a deeply personal project that investigates the slippages between memory, archive, and history, and, in turn, the weight of visibility and representation. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s experience growing up between New York and Jamaica from the 1990s to the early 2000s amidst the thriving dancehall scene. Over the past decade, Smith has assembled an ever-growing archive, at the heart of which is an extensive trove of photographs and VHS video tapes, entrusted to him by family, friends, and key figures from the dancehall scene.
At Red Bull Arts, Smith will debut a series of large-scale sculptures constructed from the remnants of demolished structures sourced over the last year from his childhood neighborhood – Kingston’s Waterhouse District. Filtered through his transgressive and challenging aesthetic, these sculptures, a precarious arrangement of hybridized multimedia monuments, house elements carefully culled from Smith’s archive. These works will be bookended by immersive, multi-channel video installations distilled from hundreds of hours of archival footage. Through presenting historical artifacts and readymade materials removed from their original contexts, Smith asks viewers to encounter this archive not as a catalogue of something past, but as part of a larger, still-living exploration of a community rooted in celebration.
Smith has spent over a decade sharing a voice deeply shaped by his childhood experiences working with his family’s fashion house, the OUCH Collective, which designed looks for prominent members of Kingston’s dancehall community.
Founded in 2013, Red Bull Arts is an experimental, non-commercial arts program dedicated to creating new opportunities for artists and fostering public engagement in the arts. With physical spaces in New York and Detroit, the program aims to extend the boundaries of exhibition making; support the production of new work by emerging and established artists; participate in and respond to the needs of local arts communities; and contribute to ongoing dialogue around contemporary issues and thought.
Curator: Maxwell Wolf