Shabez Jamal

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Current Exhibition:

April 13 - May 18, 2024.

There’s no telling time

Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Xiao He, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú.

Group Exhibition.

Release:

+ File; Curate LA; Artillery.

Press:

+ Feature (LA Art Party: April 13, 2024).

+ This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: April 11-17, 2024).

+ LA Art Openings & Spotlight (ArtRabbit: April 10, 2024).

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Bio

Donny Bradfield, also known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist and educator residing in New Orleans, LA. Born in 1992 in St. Louis, Jamal earned their BA from the University of Missouri - St. Louis and their MFA from Tulane University of Louisiana. Their artistic practice explores memory as it relates to physical, political, and socio-economic spaces. Jamal has received numerous fellowships and awards, including Harvard University’s In the City Fellowship, the Mellon Community Engaged Fellowship, and Washington University’s The Divided City Research Grant. Their work has been displayed in various national and international art spaces, such as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Their work is part of the St. Louis Community College and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art collections, as well as several private collections.

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If I am looking at the sculptural works by Shabez Jamal (Untitled 02 and Untitled 04) included in the group exhibition There’s no telling time, I see submerged photographs that remain visible through holes made by what looks like repeated attempts to recover an image from the poured concrete that partially covers the film (or I see the film’s refusal to fully sink). With these remaining traces or tracks stored in the concrete, the sculptures record this bodily event (or series of events): some body’s attempts to recover the image (as well as some body’s initial placement of the image into the still-wet concrete). But this history is at the beginning of the works, and these traces, remnants, and holes will continue to shape the possible ways in which the submerged images will be seen—or not—over time. Eventually, the concrete will disintegrate in such a way that the photographs will become visible again.

“Concrete denotes urban progress, but in Jamal’s practice we see greater emphasis placed on its entropy. The gradual breakdown of the concrete is inherent to the works themselves, foregrounding the passage of time with the understanding that eventually all of the lives within the photographs will once again be made visible.”

(Excerpt from exhibition text for Close your eyes, and remember—Jamal’s solo exhibition with Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans.)

Recording the lifetimes concealed by the concrete at the same time as enacting the ‘lifetime’ of the sculptures as material objects, the pieces act-out a history that moves backwards and forwards at the same time—making-room for the possibility of revisiting what has happened from a different perspective, at a different point in time. (Is the video performing a similar retelling of time (and space) between social, bodily, and im/material histories?)

(Is the video Like Home (Anita and the Tambourine Man) (2022) performing a similar retelling of time (and space) between social, bodily, and im/material histories?)

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: