Cbabi Bayoc
A work by Cbabi Bayoc
The Angad Arts Hotel in the Grand Center Arts District opened two intriguing exhibits this month highlighting 18 local Black artists. Catch Black Nonpareil through April 25, 2021, and Imperfect Pixels through January 31, 2021. All of the art is for sale, and the proceeds benefit worthy nonprofits.
Black Nonpareil includes 29 pieces from 17 local artists including Lola Ogbara’s lush, textural work; Cbabi Bayoc’s instantly recognizable imagery of Black families; Jerel Canty’s evocative photos of St. Louis, and many more. That exhibition is mainly on the hotel’s 12th-floor lobby, as well as on the first floor and in the ART Bar. Ten percent of the proceeds from Black Nonpareil sales go to the All Black Creatives Foundation.
In addition, the hotel is hosting a solo exhibition of Travis Sheridan’s work, Imperfect Pixels. The nine works in the show don’t immediately reveal themselves, which is exactly the point. They are portraits, but they’ve been painstakingly pixelated and inverted. Only when you take the time to request and peer through a glass-viewing orb are the subjects revealed: Black Americans whose lives were cut short by police violence.
Travis Sheridan
An image of Michael Brown revealed
The media, and social media especially, says Sheridan, distorts them after death in its echo chamber, its digital game of Telephone. If a person gets branded a thug, he says, it’s a simple matter to find a picture—a single image, a split-second moment out of a whole life—that reinforces the designation and then share that image over and over until it becomes a distorted avatar for an entire human being. Can a single photo capture Michael Brown’s life, or Breonna Taylor’s, or George Floyd’s, or anyone on the sadly ever-increasing list?
“Let’s pause and look at these individual lives,” Sheridan says.
His works require literally that—they appear only as abstractions without deliberate action on the part of the viewer. If patrons chose to simply walk past the portraits, their subjects aren’t apparent.
“It’s not triggering imagery that forces you to look at it,” he says. “There is some safety there.”
Different people looking at the images at the same time will have different experiences, says Sheridan, which is also commentary on the differing contexts we all view life through.
“Two people standing side by side, even 6 feet apart, are really viewing that piece through a different perspective,” he says—extra relevant in our socially distanced pandemic era. “I wanted to give everybody an individual experience.”
Sheridan draws inspiration from the work of Devorah Sperber, who re-creates and pixelates famous images using spools of thread, and his first art love as a kid, the mind-bending drawings of M.C. Escher.
“Some of the art that moves me the most moves me on multiple levels and allows for ongoing discovery,” Sheridan says.
The works in Imperfect Pixels have additional messaging tucked within them. All of the images, depending on orientation, are 12 by 16 pixels or 16 by 12. Sixteen refers to the number of letters in “Black Lives Matter,” and 12 is for the months of the year. Each image includes a single red pixel corresponding to the month of their death.
“A mentor taught me a long time ago that the greatest thing we can ever do in a community is use our own capacity to build the capacity of others,” says Sheridan.
To that end, half off all his proceeds from the show are going to Black-led organizations in the city. The first quarter goes to All Black Creatives, and then purchasers can choose where the second quarter goes: ArchCity Defenders, Forward Through Ferguson, or WEPOWER.
Explore the works yourself, or request a curated arts tour of the whole property for a much more in-depth look at the works and the hotel.
