Sissòn
“Waiting to Exhale”
New York, 77 Mercer Street
Holding your breath suggests anticipation. But to wait to exhale is so much more loaded. The sensation is one of withholding more than anticipating. You want to dance, but only when you can do so with reckless abandon, without surveillance or interruption, or judgment. You want to live, but only on your terms. A real life, not a half life.
Portraits of acrylic on canvas depict Black women in their variance and range. The quiet tension that precedes a revelation swirls through their paintings, all of which center the Black woman. Oxygen is the medium of life, and here serves as a metaphor for the richly varied expressions of Black female interiority. In their sumptuously textured compositions, figures that populate the artist’s physical and spiritual lives are frozen perfectly for the viewers benefit. Each static stroke is a gesture of gratitude.
To be a Black woman is to be perpetually misunderstood, taken for granted, and still the most powerful, beautiful person in the room. How can you live as an oxymoron? Is it the chicken or the egg? Are we reviled for our innate grace? Or are we powerful because of the artificial barriers we constantly disassemble? The artist’s figures look directly at you and you cannot look away. They are living patterns, all that matters in the composition, and what matters most in the life of the artist. Waiting to Exhale is a love letter. An attempt at celebrating without mythologizing. A bow to the original birthers. The mothers of humankind, the saints of today, allowing them space to be demons if they so wish, or unremarkable if that suits them better. In the poem Inhaling, from which this exhibition takes it’s title, Barbara ChaseRiboud (herself depicted in the show) asks what:
“[Is] the difference between Racing through life breathless And loitering through it Waiting to exhale.
The difference is intention. Intention that can only be reached when we know how we are perceived and what to do with that perception”
