Artists: Ále Campos and Jordan Deal
Co-curated by: Jameson Paige and Zach Hill
Presented by: Zach’s Crab Shack at Fjord
How do we visit upon our past selves, or those we have yet to become, and what are the means we employ to arrive there? In Apparition, artists Ále Campos and Jordan Deal contend with the complexity of selfhood through personal image archives and performance residues. Each artist leverages the formal integrity of the frame and grid to notate seriality’s importance in how the self is composed differently from one moment in time or context to the next. Collections of media images, organic matter, and facial impressions in varying processes of decay or preservation become relics of bodily experience. Video elements engage with artistic lineages such as Mario Montez aka René Rivera and James Baldwin, encouraging these historical figures to become conductive fixtures by which Campos and Deal relate deeper to their own interiority.
For Campos, in the rosotros series (2023–ongoing), post-performance make-up wipes become an archive of their drag persona Celeste. Each effigy is a distorted facial impression and recalls the particularities of how Celeste has been conjured across time. SCREENTEST I : CELESTE (2024), reminiscent of Warhol’s favored interview medium, is a slowly unfurling spool of Campos transforming into Celeste. The emotional and mental arrival to their drag persona charts a questioning of selfhood and its affective fracturing.
In Deal’s installation eat pray love, to the other side of an astro black kinda myth II (2024), a tapestry of precariously contained images and objects are draped and projected over with a video of media excerpts and field recordings. The tapestry creates a grid-like taxonomy of repurposed images and organic matter sheathed in plastic and separated by duct tape. Considering how to “Black” consciousness, Deal pulls images from many sources, highlighting social dance and gatherings, ironic humor, and sociopolitical effects. These representational artifacts sit next to molding breads and peppers, many of which are encased with water and urine. For Deal, encrypting these signifying images and objects in bodily refuse questions their cultural solidity, proposing instead a contingent state between life and death.
An apparition is both a ghost and a ghost-like image, likening the fullness of presence to the flatness of an image. However, apparitions are also the appearance of something remarkable, unexpected, or otherworldly. Campos and Deal’s works sit in this liminal definition, considering the weight of images and bodily relics, and how to transform them. Discretely arranged, even if precariously, and taken together as a sum of their parts, each artist creates a complex arrangement of self against the backdrop of history, identity, and personal mythography. These add up to an instability or in-flux notion of selfhood that is perpetually changing, a fearsome and cathartic concept of somatic experience.
