Deserve What You Dream
NXTHVN, New Haven, CT • nxthvn.com • Through September 1, 2024
Photo: Chris Gardner. Courtesy of NXTHVN.
Too often, exhibitions disregard a viewer’s body. Critic Brian O’Doherty famously noted this in his 1976 book Inside the White Cube. “The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not.” With Deserve What You Dream, curator Marissa Del Toro centers the visitor’s body and encourages resting and daydreaming as forms of resistance, which she posits is especially important for Black individuals and people of color. The introductory signage shares that this exhibition—with works by Derrick Adams, Isaac Bloodworth, Jihyun Lee, and Sarah Zapata—is inspired by Tricia Hersey’s 2022 book, Rest is Resistance which “proposes [that] when we allow our bodies to rest and nap, we resist the status quo and provide ourselves ‘a portal to imagine, invent and heal.’” Deserve What You Dream is such a portal, creating comfortable-to-cozy areas for reading, drawing, and contemplation throughout. By placing artworks in a lively conversation that wisely resists literal exposition of the show’s themes, the curation invites visitors to splash around in what Hersey has described as the “spiritual and somatic dimensions” of rest as resistance.
Play is foregrounded at the entrance with Bloodworth’s lighthearted, street-facing mural, featuring blue waves and “Joy the Black Boi” on a floatie. Upon entering the lobby, Lee’s doll-filled shelf sculptures continue this sense of play. The exhibition also features her surrealist sketches that bear out Lee’s approach of
“maximiz[ing] the specific state between reverie and reality.” Water, a symbol of the subconscious, appears again in Adams’ Floater paintings where adults are poolside with animal-shaped floaties. The only purely abstract works here are by Zapata, a Peruvian-American artist who explores identity, labor, and culture. These include large-scale, color field textiles that resemble shag rugs; fabric works from her “Gargoyle” series—exquisitely crafted interlopers that hug corners and melt down walls; and her site specific installation “A resilience of things not seen,” a sitting area that is as much a hug as a respite, not only anchoring the main gallery, but the bodies that rest there.
— Terri C Smith
- “Tricia Hersey: Rest and Collective Care as tools for Liberation,” on Sounds True channel, YouTube, 2021.
- From artist statement on Jihyun Lee’s website