Mortal Surface is full of semiotic tricks. I’m pulled in by material details laden with subtext, close-reading the affective sleights of Cudelice Brazelton IV’s techniques and the associations webbed delicately between the images he selects. There’s a sensation throughout the works of time compressed; an impulsive now held in strange suspension.
A text accompanying the exhibition reads like the light of a scanning bed moving slowly over every minutiae. Two tiny ink spots and a few spots of foxing … slight rust from an old paperclip, light sunning along the top edge … spine back is worn, three short tears at the horizontal fold, modest rubbing. The text goes on to explain that these phrases were selected from condition descriptions of rare books and documents written by or relating to Black people. There is both tenderness in the careful attention implied by the descriptions and brutality in the deteriorating details they report. It’s easy to anthropomorphise the books as tired bodies, their mortal surfaces worn out and in need of repair. Brazelton used the descriptions as a kind of ‘manual’ for a new series of paintings, translating the exhaustive effort of the language back into tactile materiality. Zooming in on the details of the works from my laptop, I read the surfaces for clues to process: guessing at the causal verb behind the effect. Paint is smeared, scuffed or cracked like dried earth. Unevenly settled pigment alludes to having been scrunched while damp. The words ‘AS WE SEE IT’ have been cut roughly from the canvas, the letter ‘T’ still dangling from its frayed outline.
Instances of language printed or written within the works themselves are just that – instances. Brief handfuls of syllables, they’re flashes of fragmented sense that I’m compelled to extrapolate. ‘AS WE SEE IT’. ‘Go’. ‘Record’. All three examples signal a certain anticipation: the liveness of the moment a ‘record’ button is pressed; the imperative immediacy of Go; the concurrent presence of WE and IT. As to the actual contents of the imminence alluded to here, however, they leave me hanging.
One canvas, Protocol (2024), is painted a deep sporty green with a white horizontal line running across the bottom. It reminds me of the chalky running track painted on my secondary school’s grass playing field, such that the cursive ‘Go’ sketched onto its surface recalls the pent-up adrenalin of a starting gun: a snap of stillness into flat-out sprint. In the bottom right corner of this work is a tiny printed cut-out of a figure (assumed male and Black) with his back to us, both hands raised in the air. Between this and the pearlescent silhouette of a gun in another work, Trigger Study (A Stand In), my imagination swivels from running track to gun-point arrest: an all too familiar image of impulsive Police violence against people of colour. But really the cut-out eludes any straightforward assumption: it could just as easily be a gesture of dance, celebration or worship, the figure could be a spectator at a sports game. The figure’s posture appears as perfunctory as the work’s title suggests. Regardless of context, however, the raised arms bring a further temporal charge to the work, simply because it is not a sustainable posture – arms cannot stay lifted forever. This suspends a tension of something happening, about to happen, or about to end – even if I can’t identify which or what.
The ambiguity of the gesture in Protocol leads me to wonder further about the ‘protocols’ of identification: the guesses made, conclusions jumped to. Many of Brazelton’s works seem to play with questions around the codes, surfaces and styles of identification – both by inviting and disorienting our assumptions. In Reenactor II (2024), figural representation is reduced to a stick figure. Lines of electrical tape and a grinning dental x-ray are all it takes to indicate a torso, two arms, and a head. Elsewhere, fabrics ordinarily used for garments (denim, leather, plaid) draw attention to the way fashion so often acts as a kind of short-hand for communicating identity. In Gauged (2020), tabs of leather, bolts, metal eyelets and belt buckles recall the modifications made to bodies and outfits by subcultures such as grunge and punk – acts of 'personalisation' that are as much about assimilating the collective codes of others as they are about distinguishing oneself. Contrasting the grungey industrial style is another small printed cut-out pasted to the canvas, this time of a tuxedo: the symbol par excellence of dress code?
The past tense of the title – Gauged – tells me that while I am still thinking about all this, something or someone has (already) been evaluated. A judgement has been made. I get the uneasy feeling of having fallen behind, of needing to catch up. This is the suspense in Brazelton’s works. Signifiers are always shifting and pointing somewhere new before I can settle a conclusion. Who or what has been gauged? And what is my part in it? It brings me back to the strange, loose urgency of the ‘Go’ in Protocol. Something is going, is possibly already gone, and I am left waiting for whatever comes next.
