Comments on Cosmology
Zak Ové
December 18, 2023 - January 5, 2024
DP66, 2023
Vintage cotton doilies
59 in (149.86 cm) diameter
COUNTY is pleased to present Comments on Cosmology, a solo exhibition by Zak Ové, featuring a selection of the British-Trinidadian artist’s celebrated fabric collage tondos made from vintage hand-knit doilies, along with a larger-than-life sculpture from his Invisible Man series.
Ové’s doily works, which he terms “granny psychedelia,” were inspired by the multicolored, hand-knit and hand-crocheted home décor that was a ubiquitous feature of the working-class West Indian neighborhoods of his youth. The artist was long fascinated by the shrine-like quality of doily-decorated rooms and how they symbolized the upwardly mobile aspirations of their makers, generations of immigrant women who embraced this European craft tradition as an entrée into the world of middle-class respectability. At the same time, the cosmic shapes and Day-Glo colors they used suggested an inner wellspring of creativity for which these nameless women, whose lives were largely confined to the domestic sphere, would have had few other outlets. “In consideration of the period they were made, between the 1930s and the 80s, and the role of women in the household… some of these felt like acts of rebellion,” Ové says. “They certainly couldn’t dress that way, in terms of the code of mores of their environment, the church, et cetera, but here they were making these out-there things that resemble astrological diagrams in lime green, orange, red, black, and all these far-out colors!”
The visual exuberance of Ové’s doily collages is reminiscent of other Caribbean traditions, including Trinidadian Carnival, or Canboulay, which he participated in from a young age and which his father, the renowned filmmaker Horace Ové, explored in his 1973 documentary film King Carnival. Members of the Ovés’ extended family were active in masquerade and costume making, and one of his uncles sold African religious paraphenalia. “They were very much involved in the Old World culture of Trinidad, and I think for me the epiphany… was the realization that a lot of these Old World cultures needed New World materials.” Ové’s art is a contemporary extension of the longstanding Caribbean practice of infusing European craft materials with elements of African spirituality and aesthetics. By reusing vintage doilies, he continues this cross-cultural and cross-generational conversation.
Also on view at COUNTY is Ové’s Invisible Man sculpture, which belongs to the series The Invisible Men and the Masque of Blackness, which he originally presented as a forty-sculpture site-specific installation for the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2016. Installed in the courtyard of Somerset House, the work referenced Ben Johnson’s notorious play The Masque of Blackness, which was performed for Queen Anne of Denmark in that very courtyard in 1605. The Masque of Blackness depicted exoticized images of Africans and featured the first known use of blackface in European theatre. Ové’s figure, based on a wooden sculpture his father gave him as a child after a trip to Kenya, raises his hands in a gesture of benevolence. With his placid expression and dignified bearing, he stands as a corrective to the distorted images of Africans in Johnson’s play.
Logan R. Beitmen