Tourmaline

Chapter NY is pleased to present Tourmaline’s first solo exhibition, Pleasure Garden, which will take place at Chapter NY’s temporary pop-up location. The exhibition features the artist’s recent film, Salacia, and introduces a series of five new photographs inspired by the world of the film.

In Salacia, Tourmaline builds a fictionalized story centered around Mary Jones, a black, trans, sex worker who lived in New York in the 1830s. The film takes place within historical Seneca Village—a free Black land-owning community that was destroyed for the development of Central Park—and provides a counter-history for a black trans community that has been largely erased from mainstream accounts. Her series of self-portraits is set within an imagined natural outcrop in Seneca Village and influenced by Black-owned pleasure gardens, which unlike the more prevalent white-only pleasure gardens, provided leisurely havens for Black people on the periphery of Lower Manhattan in the 1820s.

Tourmaline’s work is an invitation, asking us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible, in order to line up with our desires. Just as the Black community of Seneca Village took an enormous leap to make the impossible possible—believing that they could become free landowners at a time when Black people were enslaved—and as those who facilitated space travel made the impossible possible, Tourmaline demands of her viewers to do the same: to see this moment as an opportunity to tune into the frequency of what is most desired and always possible, and tune out of the well-practiced regurgitation of the false limits imposed all around us.

Tourmaline (b. 1983) lives and works in New York and received her BA from Columbia University. Her work has been presented across the world including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2016, 2019); MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2019); The High Line, New York (2019); The Kitchen, New York (2018); BFI Flare, London (2018); Portland Art Museum, Portland (2018), BAM Cinematek, Brooklyn (2018); The New Museum, New York (2017); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2017). Salacia has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tate.