Mixed Media Installation, 2023
The unlikely trinity of HBO TV, video games and Christianity formed the reference base for the artists second solo show presented at Copperfield Gallery. The title 'And I saw a new heaven' is drawn from dialogues featured in the game-turned-series The Last of Us and from ideas presented in Christianity and the Bible, each being platforms where the faces represented have almost always been white. The problematic status quo that church is considered high culture, and gaming is low or pop culture becomes obsolete when one references the other and as part of the Copperfield show, playable video games were presented alongside new artworks which blended the barriers between the two very different cultural forms.
Almost anywhere in the world which has been touched by white missionary work, from the Philippines to Ghana, you can find congregations of colour surrounded by posters and imagery featuring an entirely white cast of religious figures. The incongruity of a white Jesus with his apparently middle eastern origins is one thing, but within the context of lands that have experienced repression by white western imperialism, the continued use of these images by these congregations becomes more unsettling.
A series of religious posters sourced from Ghana, which in their unaltered state present a plethora of graphic and immediate imagery which draws on a pastiche of outdated advertising styles and, in turn, so does the edited response. While the Golliwog or minstrel show character is an uncomfortably recognisable icon of British and American colonial histories, the immediacy of this image when reduced to an internet style avatar, belies its complex and often obscured past.
Subtly painted edits and additions amplify the way these works aim to question, disrupt and take ownership of the problematic legacies described in hiding parts of the posters. Each panel was custom framed by hand, in an extension of the creative process by the artist, and as a nod to the idealised story of Christ the carpenter vs the realities faced by many undervalued manual work forces today.
Photos by Reece Straw