Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) presents What Makes the Earth Shake featuring work by figurative painter Dominic Chambers.
Chambers (b. 1993 St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color field theory and gestural abstraction, along with contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure. This is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the Washington, DC metropolitan region.
The exhibition takes its title from James Baldwin’s 1962 Letter to My Nephew, where Baldwin describes black life as being a reality constructed and sustained by the white imagination. Consequently, black people have had to traverse a haunting social and psychological landscape in the pursuit of freedom, equality, and self-actualization. The works by Dominic Chambers in What Makes the Earth Shake highlight the surreal conditions pervading black life. Surrealism manifests on the periphery of a seemingly ordinary experience, where racial undertones are the shadows of conversation.
The paintings in this exhibition insist on destabilizing the laborer, rebel, and insurgent roles for black people and assert the importance of authorship over one’s own reality. Forging images of the black body, undisturbed, in radiant fields of color, Chambers foregrounds the black subject and colorfield painting as harmonious companions. He proposes crucial spaces for contemplation within which his subjects can forge and reforge relationships with their minds, bodies, and souls.
With literature being an important touchstone in his work, Chambers marries written with visual recontextualizing cultural narratives through the profound use of color, layers, and imagined space. By presenting the opportunity to witness a self-determined black body in a moment of leisure, Chambers work makes a profound declaration on the American consciousness and provides an important reminder – to make the earth shake.