Kalup Linzy

The gallery is pleased to present Yearning For Your Love, a solo exhibition by Tulsa-based artist Kalup Linzy, whose practice spans performance, video, music, collage, photography, and painting. At the center of the exhibition is the newest installment of Linzy’s long-running soap opera series Conversations Wit De Churen, his shapeshifting odyssey of societal structures which debuted in 2002.

Previous iterations of the series found one of the artist’s many alter egos, Katonya, moving through the many stages of art-stardom-hood. With this new iteration of Conversations Wit De Churen (Conversations Wit De Churen XVII: As da Art Might Turn 2), Katonya faces the ever-dreaded mid-career slump. She was already included in the ‘iennale’ and major art fairs worldwide, now she meets an impasse and is unable to answer questions shared by many artists: “Where do I go from here? How far must I go to be seen?”

During her artist residency tour alongside prominent emerging artists, she struggles to abate her feelings of irrelevance and turns to social media to use her sexy body for views. Though it’s been years since Katonya’s been shown, her life went on—during which she married a handsome well-intentioned man. Reverting to her old ways leads to escalating tensions as her husband disapproves of her self-sexualization. Katonya is confronted with a choice: pursue what she believes could revive her career, or prioritize her husband’s wishes in attempts to rebuild their relationship.

Alongside the video work, paintings interpolate a possible family tree of the Braswell’s—the family which Katonya hails from. Black familial histories are rife with geographic separations, forced estrangements, and re-naming (oftentimes with the enslaver’s surname), which all work to produce an impossible opacity in the place of names and reminiscents. To create the images collaged upon these canvases, Linzy fed a neural network his own genealogical records, along with streams of stills from previous video works, generating images of possible extended relatives. Linzy shapeshifts his form back to “Mende” in Sierra Leone of the year 1750 A.D.; “Esan” who habituated Nigeria in 1795 A.D.; amongst others. Not only moving backwards, his imagined lineages continue future-facing, picturing a child who could come to bear from any number of his performed-selves.

A technological execution of Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation, Linzy’s utilization of language-learning models is admittedly fraught. For decades, Linzy has used Katonya as means to explore the ethical gray areas of artmaking, self-portrayal, and authorship. Is the forfeiting of personal data “worth it” if it pursues an image of no other means? The result lives somewhere between uncanny valley and the tender surrender only possible when surrounded by our most beloved.

Throughout Linzy’s practice, archetypes and stereotypes collapse together. Just as soap operas, reality tv, and artificial imaging operate from inherited formats, so too do our personalities. Moving from character to character depending on any given interlocuter, we find ourselves the antagonist one moment, the protagonist in another. Either direction contains a shared motivator: What must I do for them to love me?

Kalup Linzy (b. 1977, Clermont, FL) lives and works in Tulsa, OK. Linzy earned his MFA and BFA from the University of South Florida, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has had solo exhibitions at P.S. 1, New York; The Moore Space, Miami; Taxter & Spengemann, New York; The Breeder, Athens; David Castillo Gallery, Miami; Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Canada; and LAXArt, Los Angeles. In 2009, the Studio Museum in Harlem mounted the artist’s first museum survey exhibition Kalup Linzy: If it Don’t Fit, followed by a second retrospective exhibition, Melodies, Dramas, Limerence, at La Conservera Center for Contemporary Art in Murcia, Spain. In 2010, Linzy was featured on the long-running ABC soap opera General Hospital. The artist has been included in group exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; Zacheta National Museum, Warsaw, Poland; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The El Salvador Biennial; the Prospect.1 Biennial, New Orleans; the Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Russia; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; amongst others. Linzy has received numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Creative Capital Foundation Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film and Video. His work is held in the public collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Linzy is the founder and director of Queen Rose Art House in Tulsa and is a Tulsa Artist Fellowship Alumni in Residence.