Artless by Natasha Stagg

Author:Natasha Stagg [Stagg, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The World

The original date for Akeem's show was postponed due to the pandemic, delayed an entire season until phase four of reopening. A sign of unpredictable times, the purportedly last ever China Chalet party, thrown in March of 2020, was announced as a celebration of this show. Then, with no event attached, the gathering was instead an oblivious send off to the restaurant itself.

Akeem was at that China Chalet party that was no longer for him, which surprised me. I was seated near him at a wedding, once, and during the family speeches, I overheard him plotting an escape for another event. He waited out the three-course meal like a student in detention, polite but perturbed by how uncharacteristically overdetermined his evening was. At China Chalet, the coming curfews were part of an unknown future, and so a precarious, even chaotic energy was palpable. Traipsing in and out of the second-story club, the ex–guest of honor was in his element.

Actually, Akeem said, he was relieved to have some extra time to finalize his debut. The audience for this body of work was not just the art world or the fashion world, but his family and mentors, namely the subjects of the pieces being shown. More so than any of his previous endeavors, the roll-out had to be perfect. And as the photographers and fashion designers with whom he regularly works will tell you, all of Akeem's projects are not really confirmed until they're finished. Presentations of his clothing line, for example, are notoriously mysterious in terms of date, location, and city. If the work isn't right for the moment, it simply doesn't happen.

Growing up between Kingston, Jamaica, and Brooklyn, Akeem was raised around the dancehall design collective Ouch. He's been working on “the archive” of their ephemera and footage since he was a teen. Now, it was installed among articulated materials like painted wood and breeze blocks shipped to Manhattan from Kingston. The scenery recreates and distorts the content's previous contexts and the sensation of being outside looking in via the liminal settings of partially outdoor nightclubs.

“There's a weird nocturnal economy within dancehall,” Akeem explains. “For instance, Mister Morris would take your photo, and at the next party, you would buy it from him. This was his bread and butter. He wasn't a photographer that wanted to sell prints, it was more so, I'm gonna take a photo of you and you're almost guaranteed to buy it.” Now, of course, things are different. Everyone with a smartphone is their own Mister Morris. In another example recounted to Akeem, cameras at Kingston parties were at times only there for effect. “Apparently, they'd think having a video camera livens the party. Now, it seems intrusive, but before—and this was not even that long ago—it was about the video light. At the end of the party, the guy took the roll and broke it. He only wanted to video the party so it would be hype. That was their psychology.”

At the show, behind curlicue fences and layers of corrugated metal, people from another era peek and pose.

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