Visual Arts: Coral Cities, Ellen Gallagher's exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery, stems partly from a striking utopian fantasy, the myth of Drexciya, a kind of black Atlantis inhabited by a hybridised, aquatic species descended from the embryos of pregnant African women who had been thrown or jumped overboard from slave ships, during the transatlantic crossing, writes Aidan Dunne
Their embryonic babies, the story has it, learned to survive beneath the waves and gave rise to a distinct race. Gallagher is, in a way, well placed to treat the theme. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, to an Irish mother and a father from the Cape Verde Islands, her heritage spans the Atlantic
Unlikely as it may seem, Drexciya was the invention of a Detroit music group of the same name, comprising James Stinson and, reputedly, Gerald Donald. Writing in the catalogue for her show, music critic Greg Tate points to a strong utopian strand in black musical culture, from Sun Ra's extraordinary "cosmic philosophy", which included his origin on Saturn, to the Wu-Tang Clan's re-imagining Staten Island as Shaolin. Tate argues that the creation of such imaginative realms is necessary as a means to transform "blighted urban conclaves into places where liberatory dreamings could form", to spaces of possibility.
Gallagher's Drexciya-related works come under the heading of a long-running series she calls the Watery Ecstatics. She had already been involved with this work for a time when the possibility of making an exhibition for Dublin came up, closely followed by an invitation from Tate Liverpool to make a show there. She immediately thought of linking the two. As it happens, the Tate project was linked to the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade within the British empire. While Coral Cities is clearly relevant to the event, Gallagher was at the same time wary about being defined purely in that context.
Understandably so, because what we see in the Hugh Lane reflects her long-term concerns and amounts to a complex, multi-faceted engagement with African-American identity - though not at all in the rather earnest, didactic manner characteristic of much identity-based art. She developed, she says, an interest in "the evolution of black consciousness", building up collections of publications such as Ebony and Sepia. "I was interested in the ads rather than the editorial, and not just the beauty ads, but ads relating to ailments and to do with lifestyle. It was like glimpsing a whole view of a particular reality." That reality was one of an aspirational, Eurocentric middle class. "As if integration was the only possibility."
She has taken, amended and extensively reworked countless details from the magazines, often accentuating stereotypically black features, almost as though she is mocking the efforts of those who are, in a symbolic sense, trying to become white. Most baldly, a small, mixed-media piece in Coral Cities presents us with an extensively reworked page from a copy of Ebony.
She was born, as she points out, "on the cusp of that drive towards equality and integration, when the benefits but also the inevitable disappointments really came into focus". It's fair to say that her reworkings take a dim view of the attitudes encapsulated in the ads, and it is as if the single Ebony page has been infiltrated by elements of Drexciya - by, that is, images of unapologetic and uncompromised identity, as represented in the mythic possibilities of cultural expression. All of which may sound harsh, and indeed that particular piece is fairly acerbic in tone, but it should be emphasised that Gallagher's work is generally positive in mood, and it is mostly beautiful in a subtle, even understated way.
One of her trademarks is the use of classroom penmanship paper, its blue lines waiting for the students' efforts. Pasted compositely onto panels, the paper becomes a grid that echoes the grid of modernist abstraction, and it's one of several indications that Gallagher regards the modernist tradition as part and parcel of her own sensibility. She cites the utopian impulse that runs through much of modernism. "It's an ongoing theme, the sense of an idealised place. You know, it's as if we know it can't quite happen here, but it is still of the world."
In her evocations of Drexciya she generates a sense of luxuriant underwater environments. One of her Ecstatics, from 2003, depicts an intricately looped form that mingles imagery from plant and human biology, and also suggests a flourishing network, such as a subculture, or even a whole society. It adopts the idiom of scientific illustration, and she did once, she says, have a brief experience of drawing from specimens of microscopic marine creatures.
She also invents more flamboyant creatures altogether, including the pirate in Bird in Hand, which draw freely on popular cultural references.
In working she often builds up her paper surfaces into sculptural reliefs - they can resemble navigation charts - that lure us in to explore tiny pockets of collaged imagery and text from various sources. The result is a dense layering of detail, so that you have to spend some time navigating your way through the various patterns of line and form. In a much more delicate vein, she has devised a form of sculptural drawing into paper that bears some resemblance to scrimshaw. She conjures up sea creatures and plants by cutting into the surface of the paper. They are, in a way, entirely apposite to her theme: you could miss them entirely and then, in the corner of your eye, they appear, suddenly flowering into fantastically rich, exotic images.
Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities is at the Dublin City Gallery - The Hugh Lane, until Jan 20
