The Garden (Miniature Installation) &ndash Rashid Johnson
EDITION of 500 COLLABORATION WITH NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK
This mis-en-scène in a box, designed by the New York based artist Rashid Johnson is a tabletop-sized version of his iconic sculptural, altar-like installations. Comprised of a seemingly vintage black-and-white photograph of magical/shamanistic man, a small pot, and a package of seeds, the sculpture is completed when the owner opens the box, plants the seeds in the provided pot, and tacks the photograph above the newly sprouted plant.
As in here, Johnson’s sculptures most often take the form of altars to seemingly forgotten (though actually always imagined) mystics and intellectual leaders and are composed of shelving, LP labels, CB Radios, shea butter, potted plants, and other bobbles of a misremembered past. As in all of his work, The Garden creates a format for worship and remembrance of a “never time”—a negated era of discovery and renaissance that never existed but owes its lineage equally to Marcus Garvey and Richard Pryor—an era perhaps revolutionary and emancipatory but also schizophrenic and addled. Johnson’s practice confronts race and racial identity but engages such issues obliquely, making him part of a generation whose work has been termed “post-black.” Most importantly, Johnson creates worlds and with them alternative histories that combine the magical and alchemical with the necessary and essential, allowing for the domestic worship of a meaningfully false past.
