John LeKay:   It could be the industrial orange and silver color, but the first thing that comes to mind when looking at "Brooch" is torpedo's, submarine nuclear weapons. Also stacks of breasts or absurd looking bras from the 50s that were defined to create a steamlined cone or bullet shaped aesthetic. Howard Hughes's OCD and designs of the steel underwire push-up bra for sweater girl Jane Russell to wear in film The Outlaw.

The medical clamps seem to accentuate the scientific armature and also add a twist for this over sized sculpture of a decorative piece of jewelry.  Can you please tell me what inspired Brooch

Simone Leigh: In the Brooch #1, these ceramic abstractions of the body in the brooch are personal handmade conflict jewels. While diamonds are called conflict because of their derivation as spoils of war or corruption. these jewels are referencing the black body and the ethnographic object (the decorative) in art. I like to use the hatred of the decorative and craft as fodder in my sculpture. Whole countries have been collected as decoration for empire. It is easy to see how the ornamentalist separation of the decorative and Art is sometimes a socio-political boundary when you come from a country that was a jewel in the crown. The apparatus that hold the plantain like forms speak of my interest in the history of Science and its desire to "understand" the body.

JL: What about the process of making this piece?

SL: Many of the colored porcelain plantain are fired in different kiln environments. The results are surfaces that look as if they had been "naturally" patinated. I vary the surfaces with different glaze coatings so that sometimes they look more real or natural and sometimes to remind the viewer of manufacture. Those platinum nipples are just gorgeous and I wanted to juxtapose them with the unglazed terracotta to show the "refined" or assimilated with the "unrefined".

Brooch.  Detail

Fetish object with work boot scarification

JL: The fetish objects have a similar shape to Brooch, but the elongated silver gold parts resemble Spanish Maracas with scarification on the body created by timberland boots. From what I know about scarification techniques used in Africa, or artistic transformations of the human body; it is a long and painful process and transmits complex messages about identity and social status, beauty and art.

Since it's a foot print, this also adds a narrative, even possibly an abusive, or violent, connotation to this piece. Since one cannot easily apply one's boot to oneself.  The title adds another psychological dimension, being that Fetishism is primarily a fixation on an inanimate object or body part that is not primarily sexual in nature, and the compulsive need for its use in order to obtain sexual gratification.

Does the shape of the fetish object also derive from the shape in the brooch or is this something other. Also, what is this piece made out of and how did you make this beautiful piece?

SL. I love the term fetish object because of its association with the colonial texts that I draw upon in my work. Almost a generic misnomer for anything not yet understood or categorized. I like the association with Freud, that he used this word associated with the Black to create meaning about sexuality.  I like the word scarification also because of it's association with these histories.

SL: The very abstract breast like objects in work boot are cast from a mould of a large watermelon. It is decorated/scarred with work boot prints. The plungers are covered with Mica, a natural material that looks quite unnatural and Michael Jackson glittery in this context. I'm influenced by Japanese aesthetics and I like to use natural materials. Also because they resonate with ideas of essentialism and realness.

I think about the construction of realness a lot. Two examples would be the black nationalism in the 70's. Another would be the category realness in the drag balls documented in Paris Is Burning. Those are opposing interests. In one case a re-identification and nostalgia for something lost. The other about complete assimilation.

Black skin can keloid and show the memory of it's scars. I'm playing with the idea of scarification, a scar that you intend to get. The work boot prints remind you of what a scar really is.

 

 

 

Fetish. Detail work boot

White Teeth. Detail

 

JL:  Your piece that resembles rows and rows of white teeth is stunningly beautiful and also a little menacing. Standing next it it makes me realize what it must be like to get too close to a killer whale.

Can you please tell me what this piece means to you and also about the process of making it?

SL: The piece is called white teeth (For Ota Benga). I read about his capture and suicide and was struck when I saw his famous smile. He shaved his teeth into fangs which was typical grooming where he came from. Everywhere he was exhibited, he had to smile for the camera.

It's made of porcelain pinch pots and many different glaze coatings and kiln environments.  I tried to get as much color into it as I could. There is gold, kitchy mother of pearl luster and saggar fired pieces that look like coal. I thought of the white paint factory in "Invisible Man" --"ten drops of black paint make the right white!"

Zadie's Smith's diasporic romp "White Teeth" was also around.

JL; How did you discover Otta Benga; the man that was put in a cage in the Bronx Zoo with a monkey at the turn of the century? What are you thoughts on this tragic event and what does this say to you about the white colonial mentality, morality, civilization of that time? 

SL: Iconic stories like this point to the antecedent of terms like decorative, ethnic, primitive or natural. Think of the expression, 'He does it naturally' in this context. These vernacular hang out independent of origin and frame how we see even before a rubric like minimalism.

JL: Yes I can see that. I recently came across this very disturbing and incredible news clip. Kind of sums that up.

New York Times article (September 11, 1906, p. 6).by one of the editors, after studying the situation, penned the following:

Ota Benga ... is a normal specimen of his race or tribe, with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.... As for Benga himself, he is probably enjoying himself as well -as he could anywhere in this country, and
it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering. The pygmies are a fairly efficient people in their native forests....but they are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is
now far out of date. With training carefully adapted to his mental limitations, this pygmy would doubtless be taught many things. . but there is no chance that he could learn anything in an ordinary school.

 

JL: What else are you working on?

SL:  I am about to show current work at year end Henry Street Settlement Open Studio June 1 and 3rd.

 

 

 For more info visit  www.simoneleigh.com