THE BURDEN OF WAIT: PAINTINGS FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH: Michi Meko and Jodi Hays

8 December 2022 - 28 January 2023

THE BURDEN OF WAIT: PAINTINGS FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present THE BURDEN OF WAIT: PAINTINGS FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH, a two-person exhibition by Michi Meko and Jodi Hays. The exhibition will run from 8 December 2022 to 28 January 2023.
Installation View of The Burden of Wait: Paintings from the New American South at Susan Inglett Gallery. Photo: Adam Reich
The following is an interview between Susan Inglett Gallery and artists Michi Meko and Jodi Hays. Here, the artists reflect on their inspirations, artistic practices, and processes.
MICHI MEKO
Michi Meko is an Alabama-raised artist, currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is inspired by his experience as a Black man alone in nature and draws heavily from his own life story. Meko uses romanticized images of the American South as “metaphor for selfhood, resilience, and the sanity required in the turbulent oceans of contemporary America.” Meko leans into the color black as the primary medium in his works. As such, his landscapes impart a metaphysical aura, inviting the psyche to roam and wander. Meko constructs a world of the sublime: awe-inspiring, beautiful, frightening, and powerful. Punctuated by sharp lines and bursts of color, the artist shows how the simple language of abstraction can be used to conjure a universe of possibilities.

SIG: In what ways does your life experience impact your work?

Michi Meko: I think my life and my work are intimately intertwined. I'm looking for a truth in my work so personal that it resonates beyond me, beyond the typical identifiers of who made the work and why. I'm not making work in a trend bubble.
MICHI MEKO, In tandem with the whole existence: Never Separate, 2022

SIG: What does your process look like? How do you source your material? I know that in works such as, In tandem with the whole existence: Never Separate, you use fishing line. Do you buy these materials to create the works, or are they objects being used in your fishing and everyday life?

Meko: My materials are true, things that I can grab from my personal life at arm's reach in my studio or in the back of a closet. The fishing line is mine. It's not a contrived material for the sake of adding a material, it is mine, I use it outside of making work.

My process is one of looseness. It's a jazz improv, a hip-hop freestyle, a punk rock mosh, and funks unpredictably. I'm in the moment; spaces may confuse themselves in memory. They will remix, blend and transform, putting geographical references in the wrong landscapes, making a new environment map.

What one truly has to realize is that I'm not painting the landscape. I'm not some Hudson River Romantic. I live in the South, the land here is scarred, haunted, or cursed. I'm painting the landscape as a psychological event or space. The night sky might just be internal cellular energies of anxiety, happiness, or other emotions presenting as Constellations. The work is an internal landscape. The work reflects on our peaks and valleys, swamps and rivers, our own high and lowlands. We are an internal mess, and we hide it amongst our landscapes, mask or fake smiles. A walking Shit Show with a smile. Once we get deep into the natural world, the beauty and its hazards will kill you and be indifferent if one is not mindful, careful, or considerate.
What one truly has to realize is that I'm not painting the landscape. I'm not some Hudson River Romantic. I live in the South, the land here is scarred, haunted, or cursed. I'm painting the landscape as a psychological event or space. The night sky might just be internal cellular energies of anxiety, happiness or other emotions presenting as Constellations. The work is an internal landscape.

- Michi Meko
MICHI MEKO, FOGLAND: WITHIN THE BARREN VALLERY OF THE BLACK MONOLITHS. THE NARROW PATH THROUGH OUR BULLSHIT. WOOSAH MUTHAFUCKA WOOSAH, 2022
SIG: What role does geography play in situating your artistic practice? Is this body of work inspired by a specific place?

Meko: I go into these spaces to find some kind of internal peace and stillness but navigating these spaces as a Black man can be tricky not just physically, but psychologically. I'm instantly out of bounds with no home court advantage so there are several survival skills at play all at once. I'm in these environments to silence the fear, the anxieties, and voices of why I shouldn't go or concerns about my physical safety. The hero's journey through a Black dude's eyes or perspective in hopes of a transcendent moment that may or may not happen. The spaces blend, from the Nantahala, Pisgah, and Chattahoochee National Forest to the Eastern Sierras and the coast of the Pacific Northwest, Snowmass, Boulder, New Mexico, and all the spaces in between. They blend to develop a new world and a new internal space where I can colonize and name the peaks or valleys and rivers by staking my own claims of owning the land from heaven above to hell below.
Portrait of Michi Meko, Courtesy of Michi Meko

SIG: How did your love towards nature, camping, fishing develop?

Meko: I was a scout. I grew up in Alabama. The outdoors are free. There was freedom there. There still is and I'm on an adventure to find it. My uncles on both sides were these types of men. My families bragged about their catches, trips, and gardens. One of my older cousin's son bragged in church at his father's funeral in the eulogy that he is now the best fisherman in the family. My uncles went sail fishing and for Big Mahi. They hunted. We ate the kills. Their actions are a part of me. I want to continue that family thing while also tackling the grand philosophical ideas that I have of Black Navigation and being Black in the Wilderness. Why man retreats to these spaces and the psychological parts that make some stay in the front country. Legend has it that my mom is the reason I fish. That's all she wanted to do when she was pregnant with me. So yeah, it's my mom. I like that.
MICHI MEKO, Wading Fugitive. "Its not about the fish, but the water" - Artist John Gill, 2022

SIG: Can you expand on the meaning behind the title: Wading Fugitive. "Its not about the fish, but the water" - Artist John Gill?

Meko: I spend a lot of time wading in rivers. I'm often deeply saddened by the thought that not many Black men will ever stand where I'm standing or see the views and feel the frigid mountain stream on their Black skin so cold and alarming to the touch, because I'm off the beaten path of safety. Way out of my comfort zone chasing a poem or idea. In my Field Notes I write, "cold mountain streams on my American Black Nuts." Experience that John Muir. He couldn't.

The wading fugitive thinks about those before me who went in search of their freedoms. The work also nods to Fred Moten and his theorizing about Black Fugitivity. I, Michi Meko, am Fugitive, I'm on the run.

John Gill is a ceramics artist who for decades has pushed his craft into something more abstract and sculptural. I love ceramics that can push beyond the craft like him, Peter Volukos, and Don Rietz. After several of our conversations in Snowmass before I left to go fly fish a famous river he simply said, "remember Michi 'Its not about the fish, its about the water.'" It was a Yoda Star Wars kind of moment that switched my perspective. I am grateful for that. I caught no fish, but the water has become the thing.
JODI HAYS
Jodi Hays employs reclaimed cardboard, dyed fabrics, and other quotidian materials to explore the visual lexicon of the American South. She describes her practice as “a southern povera,” calling upon the use of unconventional and humble materials. Her work is further inspired by the material habits of Robert Rauschenberg and the rituals and repetitions of Beverly Buchanan. Through a deliberate use of found material, the artist visualizes the resourceful labor of women in the South as those that make, stack, sew, mend, and fix.
Studio Shot, Courtesy of Jodi Hays
SIG: Can you discuss your process? Where are you sourcing cardboard from, and does this mode of acquisition conceptually play into the message of the work?

Jodi Hays: I source materials from family consumables, estate sales, and back alleys. I take a stack of materials and put them under a dye bath, then dry it out. Many decisions from that point on are formal, owing to a life spent in considerations native to painting.
JODI HAYS, COTTON, 2022
A lot of southerners won’t claim Arkansas. Maybe the works are stubborn and self-reliant. I like to think that being overlooked, the underdog, is where the magic happens.

- Jodi Hays
JODI HAYS, Meridian, 2022

SIG: Is there a significance to the color choices in your work?

Hays: I don’t over-consider color in the beginning, but when closing the deal with a title, color is effectual.

SIG: Do the innate physical qualities of cardboard (i.e., the corrugation lines) play into your fascination with the grid?

Hays: Yes. Or reverse. My fascination with/or rather, familiarity with the grid related to textiles and painting led me to see corrugated cardboard (and the parallel lines made from rivulets of dye) anew.

SIG: Can you discuss your inspirations? Specifically, what role does poetry and the work of C.D. Wright play in the conception of your work?

Hays: C.D. Wright’s poetry is less about inspiration for me, and more about a model. I read her work, and know the voice, like a cousin (she might actually be my cousin). This, with someone like me, where I am from, making difficult abstraction, is a goddamn unexpected find.
Approximately Forever

She was changing on the inside

it was true what had been written

The new syntax of love

both sucked and burned

The secret clung around them

She took in the smell

Walking down a road to nowhere

every sound was relevant

The sun fell behind them now

he seemed strangely moved

She would take her clothes off

for the camera

she said in plain english

but she wasn’t holding that snake

-- C.D. Wright
SIG: Your work has been described as assemblage, quilting, and painting. All these classifications apply to your material strategies, are you fine with the ambitious classifications? Or would you like these works to be defined as something specific?

Hays: A lot of terms have been applied. The works are in conversation with piecing and assemblage, and we can also call them paintings. I like to keep my foot in that door.

SIG: Can you expand on the meaning behind the title, May/December?

Hays: I enjoy when titles both confound and elucidate. I chose the works in conversation with Michi’s, thinking about land and place. May/December connotes a seasonal relationship and is also the age-old name for a couple with a significant age gap.
JODI HAYS, MAY/ DECEMBER 2022
JODI HAYS, Sweet one, 2022

SIG: How has your practice evolved from paintings on canvas to more three-dimensional textural works? What caused this evolution?

Hays: I’ve always loved the ideas around stripes, grids, and associative connections to textiles. Pieced and sewn canvas were a timid presence in the work, as far back as 2016. I always kept a few shallow shelves in the studio with hard-to-classify things, things I want to see in the world (knobs, rocks shaped like Tennessee, folded bits, crafts). At the gentle nudge of a friend, I had a show in 2020 that narrowed the rift between my more conventionally made paintings and the rarely shown material moves. First, I took canvas and cloth napkins to a bucket of bleach, then came dye, then came wallpaper and cardboard. Enter a studio breakthrough. All of my material and conceptual concerns up until then turned up in the most ubiquitous of materials.
Portrait of Michi Meko

MICHI MEKO (b. 1974) is an Atlanta-based artist who focuses on the African American experience of navigating public spaces while remaining buoyant within them. Meko was born in Florence, Alabama, and received a BFA in Painting from the University of North Alabama. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. Meko's work was seen recently in a solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta, Chicago and included in Valerie Cassel Oliver's "The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse."
Portrait of Jodi Hays, Courtesy of Sam Angel

JODI HAYS (b. 1976) is a Nashville-based artist whose work explores the material vocabulary of the American South through reclaimed and repurposed cardboard, textiles, and fabrics that resemble screen doors, old boards, and sign paintings. She received her BFA from the University of Tenneessee and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art. She is a 2019 Finalist for the Hopper Prize. Her work has been seen most recently in a solo exhibition at Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

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THE BURDEN OF WAIT: PAINTINGS FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH: Michi Meko and Jodi Hays

THE BURDEN OF WAIT: PAINTINGS FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH

MICHI MEKO

JODI HAYS

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