"Emerge as it must." by Bryn Evans

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Danielle Deadwyler: Object-Subject: Flaw is the Only Recourse curated and mentored by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and on view at CUE Art Foundation from November 4 – December 15, 2021. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online.

Danielle Deadwyler, still from CHOR(E)S, 2020. Film, 12 minutes 59 seconds.

[Image description: A photo of a dark-skinned woman turning towards the camera. Her long, straight hair is whipping around her head.]

Emerge as it must.

this must be the spook house
another song with no singers
lyrics/no voices
& interrupted solos
unseen performances

-Ntozake Shange
for colored girls who have considered suicide /
when the rainbow is enuf

after Danielle Deadwyler

runnin ‘round the house nekkid

I cut out the light. then ducked

cross the hall to the bathroom

fore my other selves could catch

the blurred sight of my shoulders 

fallin offa my back n out

the bedroom door. poolin

onto white porcelain, my cheeks,

cool, hung off the sides n puckled

where the fat pressed my skin.

easy. until my arms came heavy

until my arms cut out the light

grew light, like mirrors, or crude

wings, i cut out the light n I cut

the rug. did you see me dancin?

me on that rug, me on those walls,

bouncin the way I was, light offa my

back lit…you’da thought i was God runnin

nekkid ‘round my garden, growin

things. cuttin out the light

up outta the face of the deep,

the core of us, sinkin

I saw myself from round the corner

n I couldn’t read her face or

the one on top of the staircase

shook so much the house shook

with her. so much I wonder if bein

God mean lookin at myself n

wonderin whether I should be sad

or scared. but did you see me
dancin? bouncin the way

I was like mirrors, growin things

up outta my blurred selves,

they pooled, puckled, tired

faces of the deep, a chorus

n I cut out the light fore they could

catch it peekin through

the lens of my hallowed eye

A lithe Black woman stands dressed in a dark blue skirt that brushes her toes. Her blouse, tucked-in at the waist, blends in with the room’s blue-green walls. She stands apart from and a part of the scene. Body still, her angled arms echo the chair’s arched wooden backing, the half-a-heart of the coffee mug handles. Her hair, glossy black body waves, is a veil over her face, like ebony window blinds twisted shut. Her clothing marks her as a fixture of the house, or as the domicile itself, the room personified. A white light flashes. The house begins to shake.

Danielle Deadwyler, still from CHOR(E)S, 2020. Film, 12 minutes 59 seconds.

[Image description: A photograph of a dark-skinned woman standing facing the viewer with her hands on her hips in a light blue room. The woman is standing to the left of and slightly behind a set dining room table and in front of two windows with white blinds drawn down. She is wearing a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt and dark blue skirt and has long hair covering her face, giving the illusion that she is facing the opposite direction.]

Danielle Deadwyler’s CHOR(E)S begins in a blue dining room, where a pendant light above the kitchen table warms a dim scene. Deadwyler choreographs her body inside this Atlanta home to make plain the weight of domestic work, which falls disproportionately on the bodies of Black women and femmes — a measure of social stratification underscored by anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy. An experimental reckoning, CHOR(E)S depicts the exhausting nature of this labor. Deadwyler moves in isolated, repetitive actions that disrupt the calm, unassuming rooms in the film. Her shoulders bounce vigorously as a chopped ‘n screwed version of "Don’t Disturb This Groove” begins to play, each repetitive movement accented by a don’t disturb, don don don, dis dis dis, don disturb. The incorporation of a chopped ‘n screwed soundscape adds to the film’s uncanny feel. Skipped beats, exaggerated stop-times, and record scratching prevent a reliance on sonic expectation, while the reverb warps the audio, forcing a re-evaluation of the lyrics. The System's sexy synthpop ballad morphs into a blaring alarm; Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” is pared down to a blunt two-word question: who run?

CHOR(E)S (read as ‘CHORES' or ‘CHORUS') depicts a chaos of removal as the film's object-turned-subject resurfaces through the repurposing of language, the repurposing of flaw. The film functions as a clarion call for 232 lenticularities — taken together as one work — a chorus of self-portraits that act as harbingers of self-making. Deadwyler considers “flaw” to be that which is “is out of order. Not a negation, however, what is an aberration. The lead into chaos. The miniscule inviting us into grand majuscule,” she tells me via our email exchange. 

In this way, Object-Subject: Flaw is the Only Recourse positions three bodies of work — CHOR(E)S; 232 lenticularities; and 3 lenticularities posters overlaid with text from the 1881 Atlanta Washerwoman Manifesto — together as they perform a distinct choreography. Flaw as the loose thread that results in the body’s unraveling, the pull that makes the fabric come undone.

During our conversation, Deadwyler describes her lenticularities as “the ‘us’s’ in conversation, dialogues across time and space on what we have rendered as flaw, and how we have transfigured it, transmuted it into power…Everything is plural. Repetition yields inevitable shifts.” Produced over the span of three years in three different locations, the lenticularities reflect the artist’s journey through great personal changes, across what Deadwyler calls “an era of transgression.” The word ‘lenticularity’ is a poem itself. It stems from the shape of an eye lens: a biconvex lens, a reflection atop another reflection. The lenticularity represents the self across multiple planes, a phenomenon that yields the peculiar terror of becoming lost to one’s own image. In this way, the word and the portraits that bear its name embrace a reality in which the self can bend across time and space, one in which the artist can alchemize the terror in the shifts, or the flaws accumulated in the portraits, to yield multitudes of selfhood.

The lenticularities do not focus into one single image — they represent converging perspectives across years of self-making. This aversion to convergence, or the failed/flawed attempt, yields the aberration, which is where the exhibition takes shape. [1] That which is perceived as flaw is where the resolve resides. Where there is aberration, light peeks through. Thus, it is through the lenticularities, through Deadwyler’s serial performativity, that the possibilities within the shifts, within the flaws, emerges. “That which terrifies should not be controlled,” she tells me, “it should just be allowed to emerge as it must.” 

Witnesses to the domestic tension seeping through the scenes of CHOR(E)S, a selection of lenticularities bear the breath of admonition. Deadwyler augments a limited number of portraits with text from the 1881 Atlanta Washerwoman Manifesto. In July of that year, twenty-four Black laundresses convened at a local church, where they founded the Washing Society. In three weeks, the group of twenty-four had grown to three thousand through door-to-door canvassing and expanding support from Black church congregations. The women demanded greater autonomy for their labor and increased wages: one dollar per pound of laundry. The strike catalyzed labor disputes among other domestic workers in the city, effectively dispelling any doubt regarding the indispensable nature of Black women’s domestic work in the city.

The exhibition’s invocation of the washerwoman's strike and manifesto is multivalent. Ghosts fill the rooms depicted in CHOR(E)S. Deadwyler’s jerking resembles the body of someone possessed. She moves, encumbered by a weight invisible to the viewer’s eye. Could the repetitive act also be a summoning? Could her body’s rejection of labor’s rituals also be a centuries-old rebuke? In the film, viewers look on as a silent Deadwyler lurches and heaves. Her clarion call bellows out from the mouths of the lenticularities — the washerwomen’s manifesto, survived in the portraits, reckons with the weight of another burden, a familiar load. And they talk back, gesturing to the bell hooks’ text and quote from which the exhibition derives its name: “It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated voice.” [2]

How does one move through that? Deadwyler posits over Zoom. Through the flaw. Learning that the flaw is power. And that was the experience of the time…from being one who has been or was

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[1]  “Aberration” Optics. The failure of (reflected or refracted) rays of light to converge to a focus; a defect in an optical system leading to such a failure. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2021 (accessed September 3, 2021).
[2]  bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 9.

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This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. 

Bryn Evans is a writer, artist, and curator based in Decatur, Georgia. She situates her work within Black feminist theory and performance, with a focus on Southern Black geographies and vernacular poetics. Evans earned her BA in African American & African Diaspora Studies and Art History from Columbia University.

Mentor Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, Frieze, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.