‘My mom would sew at home, making curtains and clothes... She would trace patterns on the floor, and I frequently work on the floor as well. I use a lot of the fabric that she collected. She would also reuse things. If my sisters outgrew a pair of pants, she would turn them into skirts. I do that in my practice. Everything is a part of the space that it was created in.’ – Tschabalala Self
A vibrant patchwork of varied textures and colours, Florida, 2015, embodies Tschabalala Self’s distinct artistic practice, whereby painterly compositions become haptic and three-dimensional, akin to the tactile surfaces of craftwork. Created in 2015, the work coincides with Self’s graduation from her MFA in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, where she learned to mix media and genres to conjure intricate, multifaceted scenes on canvas. With its multifarious textures and mix of pastel and elementary colours, Florida typifies the artist’s tendency to use assemblage as a method to explore perspectives on femininity and identity politics at large. ‘A stereotype is a flat character with two dimensions’, she writes. ‘And I can confront those stereotypical images by making round, multidimensional characters with complicated desires, inner dialogues, and psychology’ (Tschabalala Self, quoted in Stephanie Eckhardt, ‘Meet Tschabalala Self, the 26-Year-Old Artist Empowering the Lives of Black Women’, W Magazine, 16 January 2017, online).
Embodying Self’s pantheon of self-confident and self-aware female protagonists, Florida challenges the tradition of female portraiture in the art historical canon, continuously defined by a tendency to minimise, utilise or fetishise the female body, primarily through the exploitation of a woman’s physical or sensual attributes. About to straddle an alligator's back amidst a flurry of wild foliage, the character taking centre stage has claimed her body as hers, like an Amazon taking over nature. With distinct prints of her face collaged across her body, Florida’s protagonist shares pictorial affinities with David Hammons’ celebrated series of body prints, which similarly records the presence of black human subjects across the surfaces of his works. As stated by Monica Uszerowicz, ‘The bodies of black and brown women are simultaneously subject to idolatry and subjugation’ in Self’s work. The artist ‘acknowledges the fantastical nature of their depictions, while giving them a world of their own’ (Monica Uszerowicz, ‘Immersed in the Playful, Communal World of a Bodega’, Hyperallergic, 3 January 2018, online).
