Projection: The High Yellow Pavilion for Renisha McBride and Other Works by Tomashi Jackson

"The Parrish Art Museum will present the projection of five videos by Tomashi Jackson onto the south façade of the Parrish on Friday, August 7 (rain date Saturday, August 8), from 9-11 pm, as a unique drive-by experience from Montauk Highway, with limited access for parking and walking on the outdoor premise to watch projections. No indoor or bathroom access. The videos run in a 50-minute loop.

“I am thrilled to work with Tomashi Jackson to mark her presence at the Museum this summer, while her exhibition Parrish Platform: Tomashi Jackson—The Land Claim, scheduled to open this July, had to be postponed to Summer 2021,” said Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects.

“While the circumstances surrounding this outdoor screening program for the Parrish Art Museum were unanticipated, the method viewing this series returns the research and reflection for these works back to the physical realm of public space,” says Tomashi Jackson.

The projected video collage works were made between 2014 and 2017. They are born of two distinct bodies of work interrogating lived narratives of public spaces in the United States. The first three pieces are from the body titled “The Subliminal is Now,” a 2016 solo exhibition at Tilton Gallery New York, that visualized research on the history of American school desegregation, the perception of innocence among children as a protected class of people, and contradictions of such assumptions and policy ideals in contemporary public space. The artist drew from legal archives of court transcripts and photo documentation produced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal and Educational Defense Fund (LDF) (founded in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall) as sites of meditation and visual reference to contrast with multiple present day cases of Black children, teenagers, and young people (Michael Brown, Jr., Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, and Aiyanna Stanley Jones), being brutalized and killed by police and vigilantes nationwide.

The first three works all use pieces of music as anchors. In “Self Portrait: Tale of Two Michaels” the figures lip sync and dance to the sound of “It Keeps You Running” by the Doobie Brothers. In “Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence” the figures lip synch the background vocals for “Give Me the Reason” by Luther Vandross. In “The High Yellow Pavilion for Renisha McBride” Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” serves as a sound component.

The final two pieces are taken from the body of work titled, “Interstate Love Song,” a solo exhibition at the Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, Georgia. That body explored lived experiences of compromised access to transportation in and around Atlanta as the outcome of decades of voting referenda preventing the expansion of public transportation thus maintaining deeply segregating residential patterns. The artist drew from conversations with Georgians about historically counter intuitive transportation policies and their link to the county unit voting system also known as “The Rule of the Rustics.” The primary text of reference for this work was White Flight: Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University. The pieces projected in this screening exist as photographic c-prints of key stills from each of the two video collages. They exist as a part of an interconnected ecosystem of painting, fiber work, sculpture, video, and photography produced from practices of research, archival inquiry, and abstraction from which the contemporary figure emerges as an actor implicated in public spaces of governance, policy, and human rights."

Parrish Art Museum