PHILADELPHIA — The artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden hit the gun vary on a sweltering Monday in July. The air was sticky inside the power, however her routine wouldn’t be denied. She shoots each week and avoids weekends, when the vary will get crowded and loud with males firing off assault-type rifles, inviting sensory overload.
It is perhaps a well-recognized exercise for some Americans. Less so for an artist. But McClodden, 41, a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial who has three main displays of labor now up in New York City — at 52 Walker, the Shed, and the Museum of Modern Art — didn’t buy weapons and get her carry license two years in the past with artwork in thoughts. At least at first.
She did it — like many different Black Philadelphians, she recollects — after the pandemic drained the streets, after which the George Floyd protests and counter-protests stuffed them with interlopers and a way of swirling violence. Safety and self-defense had been her considerations.
The employees on the vary greeted her warmly — she educated right here, incomes her membership. She purchased ammunition and paper targets with pink silhouettes or a number of oval bull’s-eyes. At her lane, she took out her three handguns — a Walther .22 with a Glock and Smith & Wesson, each 9-millimeters — and positioned them earlier than her, with care.
“Every bullet that I load, I’m breathing through it,” she mentioned. “I’m adjusting to being in the space. There’s a protocol.”
An hour later, McClodden was headed to her studio in North Philadelphia. She had concluded her goal observe, as at all times, with a sequence the place she drew methodically, earlier than every shot, to interrupt the machine-like spell of firing with out pause. This put the human stakes straight in her ideas — reminding her that this isn’t a recreation. “There’s life there,” she mentioned.
It wasn’t for artwork — however artwork occurred anyway. The result’s “Mask/Conceal/Carry,” a brooding beast of an exhibition, bathed in blue gentle, at 52 Walker, the David Zwirner house in TriBeCa.
It finds McClodden, who emerged as a filmmaker earlier than increasing to installations, at her formal broadest, together with movies, sculptures, bronzes, textual content and her first portray collection. But its theme is tight: An artist’s journey via taking pictures to confront herself and set up her place on the planet — in all of the aspects of her id.
Bold, continuously jarring, the exhibition varieties a type of triptych this season with McClodden’s different Manhattan displays: a room-size set up at MoMA that could be a tribute to Brad Johnson, a Black homosexual poet who died in 2011, with a bondage and fetish theme; and on the Shed, a sweeping program she curated on the historical past of Black dance.
The result’s 3 ways to fulfill an artist who could also be America’s most important right this moment, one who’s adamantly particular person and searingly frank about race, gender, sexuality, religious life and extra — the higher to carve a accountable function within the tradition. Celebrating a forgotten determine like Johnson, or a whole subject like Black dance, is her method to acknowledge and renew creative lineages — a type of accountability.
“This is all a practice in not being ignorant,” she mentioned. “Period.”
On the wall by her desk had been her talismans — a poem by Johnson, {a photograph} of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a darkish object that bristled with brief vertical spikes. It was a country instrument used to take away seeds from cotton, redolent with associations with Black labor. “It’s the most painful thing in the studio,” she mentioned. “I have it there because it’s a representation of a feeling — something that causes me immense distress but is almost unseen.”
Topping one pile of books was “Unmasking Autism,” a brand new work by the psychologist Devon Price. Back in 2001, McClodden mentioned, a health care provider instructed that she was on the autism spectrum however she dismissed the thought. “I took it as a negative,” she mentioned. But in 2019 she obtained a analysis — it took time and was costly — and she or he continues to embrace its insights.
“I hid for a long time,” she mentioned. She lived with the signs — overstimulation, nonverbal intervals, confrontational habits — whereas forging on together with her artwork. Now it affords steerage. “I’ve decided to match my lived experience as a person with autism, at the intersection of a lot of identities, as a constant state of discomfort,” she mentioned. “So the work has to be uncomfortable.”
Her autism expertise performed a task within the alchemy of occasions that produced “Mask/Conceal/Carry” (and provides one other layer of that means to the title). When she began coaching to shoot, the noise and motion had been overwhelming. “My sensory issues sent me out of the range,” she mentioned. “I couldn’t get the sound off my skin.”
To prepared herself, she took up dry firing — taking pictures with out ammunition — within the studio. A cellphone app measured information from a node on the gun and she or he included the data in work: They are black with a number of squiggles in blue, inexperienced, white or crimson segments, tracing in paint the info report on a shot. “I can feel in my body everything that I see here,” she mentioned. “It’s like a graphic score.”
In the studio had been a toaster oven and a vacuum press for making sculptures out of Kydex, an artificial materials usually used for gun instances. On the studio wall had been stenciled texts on canvas, from a brand new collection. Some learn like mantras: “Train to Failure,” “Hold Everything At Once.”
“It’s from a training on how to live with difference,” she defined. Other messages to herself — “Black Insanity on the Ledge of a Death Star” — had a wilder really feel. “It’s almost like the name of a punk band,” she mentioned.
The books in her library recommend different influences on the present, together with titles on trauma and race; the sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose heads evoke ritualistic bondage; the Benin bronzes, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s pioneering information portraits of Black America. “He’s able to deliver information about the dire circumstances of an entire group of people,” she mentioned.
Shopping on-line for targets, McClodden found a world of pictures of staged scenes: a shooter behind a automotive, a hostage state of affairs. They are sometimes utilized in regulation enforcement coaching and she or he was intrigued that the majority the figures had been white. She made a video the place a sequence of photographs reveal a single darkish silhouette beneath these characters.
But McClodden is right here to look at, to not opine. Sure, she has views — she helps “red flag” legal guidelines that will forestall probably harmful folks from proudly owning weapons; opposes gun entry for minors, and “wouldn’t mind” an assault rifle ban. But this isn’t a present about gun coverage.
“I’m not interested in articulating or taking on grief for the larger society, as a Black woman,” she mentioned. “I’m telling you how I sleep well at night. This is the regimen that I took to know of this time.”
Ebony L. Haynes, the director of 52 Walker, who curated the exhibition, mentioned that the present could really feel well-timed however that it’s not concerning the information. “The material that Tiona is working through has a long history that is important to uncover,” Haynes mentioned.
“If ‘social change’ even creeps into my work,” McClodden mentioned, “I’m destroying it.”
McClodden has a samurai-like status within the artwork world, bolstered by her selection to stay in Philadelphia — the place she has turned her studio annex right into a micro-gallery and studying room known as Conceptual Fade — and to maintain distance from the New York artwork scene. Her pals pull between expressing their very own admiration and pointing to her lighter sides.
“You use thumbtacks, Tiona uses a razor blade,” Sadie Barnette, who shared residency time together with her in 2018 on the Skowhegan School, mentioned of her precision. At the identical time, “she’s this person who drinks fancy whisky, D.J.s the best party of the summer, and is kind.”
“People are scared!” the artist Kevin Beasley mentioned. “She has that ability to tighten up the space just by entering the room.” He added, “She’s the audience you want to have, someone who makes you more conscious of the decisions you make.”
McClodden talks frankly about her edge. “I’ve worked on some of my difficulty,” she mentioned, “because I had to understand what it is.”
She grew up in Greenville, S.C. The household had instances of instability and transience. She was sensible and drawn to images, and gravitated to the punk scene. She enrolled at Clark Atlanta University however dropped out.
She is lesbian — she makes use of the time period proudly, satisfied it’s being marginalized — and talks fondly about her mentors: “The butch, the bull-daggers, those are the folks who took care of me when I was sneaking off to the clubs.” For her first film, in 2008, she interviewed some 50 Black lesbians of various backgrounds. “I was trying to complicate that monolith,” she mentioned.
She discovered properties, too, within the BDSM and kink world, and in African and Afro-Cuban spirituality; she is initiated in Santería, and her orisha is Ogun, the god of iron and warfare. His drive is felt in her epic installation for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, which concerned felling a tree by axe in Maine, carving ritual objects from its wooden within the studio, carrying them to Cuba and Nigeria and filming the method. It earned her the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award given to an distinctive Biennial artist. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, known as her contribution “extraordinarily rich with cultural, historical, and spiritual resonances.”
Her fearlessness is at the moment on view at MoMA in “The Brad Johnson Tape, X — On Subjugation,” a piece first produced in 2017 and just lately acquired by the museum, the place she filmed herself reciting Johnson’s poetry whereas suspended by her ankles from a rig. Fetish objects, books and an avalanche of rose petals full the show.
“The work offers an extraordinary model of freedom,” mentioned Lanka Tattersall, a MoMA curator of drawings and prints. “To understand and express your sexuality and erotics to the limits of your possible comfort is one of the biggest offerings an artist can give.”
McClodden’s mission on the Shed celebrates Dance Black America, a groundbreaking 1983 pageant on the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It consists of customized dance flooring, video portraits of dancers of various kinds and generations, and a efficiency collection. One topic is Mikki Shepard, who produced the unique occasion.
“I’m glad she discovered it,” Shepard mentioned. “She’s documenting it again but through a fresh pair of eyes.”
McClodden recollects spending lengthy stretches in the course of the pandemic driving in Louisiana and Mississippi, researching “Play Me Home,” her set up within the Prospect 5 triennial in 2021. It was a roots journey. She positioned relations, noticed lands they maintain and different websites misplaced to predatory leases. She remembered how males in her household — at all times males — — continuously hunted, and served within the navy.
To know herself as a shooter deepens this intimate voyage. But the artwork is a file for historical past. “This is about to be material culture of this time,” she mentioned. “The statement is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself.” She added: “I’m not trying to hide behind slavery, or something in the 1700s. I’m like: In 2020 to 2022, this is what I was doing.”
Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Mask/ Conceal / Carry
Through Oct. 8, 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan (212) 727-1961; 52walker.com.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden: The Trace of an Implied Presence
Through Dec. 11 on the Shed, 545 West thirtieth Street, New York, (646) 455-3494; theshed.org.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, The Brad Johnson Tape, X — On Subjugation
Ongoing, the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400. moma.org.
