Quinci Baker, Venus, 2022, 30″ x 24″Opening Reception: Thursday, July 21 from 7pm to 10pm
Mehari Sequar Gallery had announced the upcoming opening of Quinci Baker’s solo exhibition Show Your Hand
Curated by Maleke Glee, Show Your Hand is the first solo presentation of artist Quinci Baker, a 2021 MFA graduate of Yale School of Art. Baker works within a lineage of Black women artists using the most intimate of materials, which carry histories and serve as an archive of those often dismissed from modes of documentation deemed most legitimate. For this reason, and from this vantage, Show Your Hand references the viewpoint of Venus Williams. Wiliams’ representation shifts depending on the viewer’s projections and intentions, often passive and intuitive.
Show Your Hand employs the match and media moment between Venus Williams and Lindsay Davenport at the 1999 Australian Open as a conceptual center. For Baker, this, like all moments, is the amalgamation of ideologies and epistemological lenses compressed. The minute holds a mass of information; an expression, gesture, or guttural response is the sum of its parts. Through the deconstruction and augmenting of images, use of layering, and material make-up, she visually conveys a conceptual interest. This presentation engages other motifs employed by Baker that are both material and theoretical. Namely abstracting figures, high engagement with color, varying scales, and series wherein small work add to a larger vision. Baker is interested in the role and influence of the individual within a collective and expresses it through displays that group opaque and abstract figuration, and materials with social function.
Mehari Sequar Gallery is located at 1402 H Street NE Washington, DC 20002.
Inquiries: info@meharisequargallery.com / khaleelah@meharisequargallery.com
