Lorraine O’Grady, Body Is the Ground of My Experience @Alexander Gray
By Loring Knoblauch
( … ) Comments/Context: Lorraine O’Grady’s excellent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 (reviewed here (https://collectordaily.com/lorraine-ogrady-both-and-brooklyn museum/)) provided a broad introduction (or re-introduction) to the work of a multi talented artist whose lasting artistic importance had been under appreciated. The consistently insightful show covered her efforts in a variety of mediums – including performances and staged events, text-based collages, conceptual essays and statements, and photographs, both as documentation of her performances and in an evolving studio-based practice – and tied all of those disparate artistic threads together into a sophisticated and idea-rich package.
Part of what was on view in that larger exhibit was a series of photomontages O’Grady originally made in 1991 under the title Body is the Ground of My Experience. This much
smaller gallery show offers a second look at that particular project, as paired with additional works made during the same year. Presented now in a spacious open installation, we can more easily examine the photomontages on their own, outside the larger flow of O’Grady’s entire career.
After a number of years of orchestrating her own performances in front of the camera, in the early 1990s O’Grady turned to the photomontage as way to combine and control her. presentation of imagery, and to bring a more bitingly Surreal tone to her work. Body is the Ground of My Experience is a decently literal title for the project that became her first one-person show at INTAR Gallery in New York, as not only do the works draw from O’Grady’s lived experience as a Black woman of Caribbean heritage, several use cropped photographs of the curves of Black bodies as an unexpected representation of the land. ( … )