Contested Bodies
by Nikolai Noel

Contested Bodies was the third exhibition of the collaborative works of artist Matthew P Shelton and Nikolai M Noel. The exhibition ran from December 02, 2016 through to January 20, 2017 at Second Street gallery, Charlottesville, VA, USA.

Nikolai M. Noel (b. 1976, Port of Spain, lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago), and Matthew P. Shelton (b. 1982, Danbury, NC, USA, lives in Charlottesville, VA, USA) use collaboration as a platform from which to speculate about the interrelationship of history, place, embodiment, and the self from their respective positions as a person of color from the West Indies and a white American man. Using materials that blur the line between the concrete and the metaphoric, their collaboration explores questions of power, agency, memory, and subjectivity through strategies of abstraction and representation. Their collaboration manifests as an ongoing conversation from their remote locations via WhatsApp, punctuated by episodes of intense in-residence art making and reflection. Their collaborative projects have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, ME, USA; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, USA; and at Alice Yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, WI.

In an era of mobile computing, the geographical separation of Trinidad and Virginia (3400km/2100 mi) can be interpreted as a form of metaphorical remoteness. Whereas in the past, this distance preempted the possibility of collaboration, today it becomes an illustration of a state of apartness. Our collaboration explores connection and separation as they are traceable to and emanate from the history of the New World, and the social, cultural, political, and ethnic separation produced by that history. We materialize our respective positions as Caribbean and American, person of color and white, descendant of the colonized and descendant of the colonizer.

For contested bodies, we continue to explore traditional methods like drawing and the printed image, but also elemental materials like salt, blood, and sweat, in conjunction with mirrors, found objects, text and handmade paper. The exhibition invokes ritual, cartography, and magic through gestural installation strategies that call to mind postmodern art approached like minimalism and arte povera.

In addition to conceptualizing distance as a material, we also recognize the role despair plays in our sense of connection. Because we both struggle with hopelessness, irony, humor and sincerity intermingle within the work. The project allows us to build something within that general state of pessimism, to make things out of it, to tame the despair by naming it and its constituent pieces, but also to escape it or mock it. This underscores the purpose of the collaborative project in general: to bind our fates, to further forge our friendship, to ward off depression, and perhaps to inoculate ourselves from the fruits of the seemingly inexorable state of apartness characteristic of life today: anxiety, dread, exploitation, alienation from self and other, shame, lost futures.

 From our differing sides of DuBois’s color line, we attempt to poetically interpret the sort of mechanisms by which power bewilders both the oppressor and the oppressed, and consider how we might describe our affective experience of such bewilderment. It’s our hope that through our use of images, objects and gestures, we establish a lingua franca by which we might encounter, “talk back” to, and even alter what James Baldwin once called “that historical creation, oneself.”

Other Links:

https://www.c-ville.com/observations-privilege-amnesia-second-street-gallery/