Hew Locke: Passages
Yale Center for British Art
1080 Chapel St.
Through Jan. 11
The boat hovers on just this side of real. If it’s real, it’s from a country far south of the United States, where everyone paints everything in more vivid colors than we ever see, even in New Orleans or Miami. But there’s a sense that it’s a vibrant dream of a boat, too, something pulled from a future that is at once more desperate and more alive than the one we live in now — a future where certain truths, about economic fragility and environmental collapse, have come home to roost, and people have found a way to adapt and move forward, preserving themselves, their cultures, and the things that give their lives joy and meaning in the process.
The boat, The Survivor, is one of three ships gliding through the lobby of the Yale Center for British Art to introduce “Hew Locke: Passages,” a survey of the artist’s work from the 1990s to the present running now through Jan. 11. It’s also a suitable introduction to the myriad themes that drive Locke’s work. “Locke has described the sea as the connective tissue between world cultures. Inspired by his own journeys between Britain and Guyana, he has used the boat as an enduring sculptural motif. His ramshackle vessels look as though they have made many perilous journeys. Like ghost ships, they are devoid of people, but their cargo alludes to disparate travelers, ranging from tourists and traders to refugees and pirates,” an accompanying note states.
One ship’s sails are decorated with “historical images of bananas being loaded and sugarcane being cut, interspersed with share certificates and banknotes.” Another ship “carries on its deck a British colonial plantation house, once the site of enslaved labor, now repurposed to prepare for a great flood. Collectively, the boats evoke a wide range of meanings, from colonial conquests and the climate crisis to the hopeful journeys of people seeking a better life.”
In its presentation, the YCBA frames Locke squarely as an artist speaking to colonialism and its aftermath, tweaking the symbols of power to critique their very real depredations. As another note in the exhibition states, Locke deploys “strategies of appropriation to reveal and upend the visual codes of imperialism…. Incorporating multiple media, including sculpture, photography, drawing, and found objects, Locke’s oeuvre has been described as a ‘postcolonial baroque’ that deconstructs and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty. His rich, dense, highly textured” work “fuses vernacular and formal traditions influenced by his British and Guyanese heritage.
Locke is in a rich position personally to make his critiques. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and moved to Georgetown, Guyana, with his family in 1966 — arriving “in time to witness the colony declare its independence from Britain,” another note relates. “Locke returned to Britain in 1980 and emerged as an artist during the highly politicized environment of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.” All the while, he “maintained close ties to Guyana. His experiences of migration, diaspora, nation-building, and hybrid cultures appear as the central themes in his work.”
This thread moves through the entire show. Locke has drawn heavily from Guyana’s complex history, from independence to its “recent oil boom and the impact of climate change on its landscape.” In Locke’s eyes, the “former plantation houses, once grand, become symbols of change.” The works “capture and document them before environmental catastrophe washes away the evidence of their existence.” Locke’s work Hinterland features a photograph of a statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in Georgetown from 1894 to 1966, when Locke saw its removal. It was “banished to a botanical garden” — a hinterland — “where it lay overgrown until it was restored and reinstated in front of the Supreme Court building in the 1990s,” a note relates.
In the 1990s, the accompanying text teaches, Locke made sculptures from plastic doodads — “plastic animals, dolls, toy weapons, and fake gems” — that he used to recreate portraits of royalty and coats of arms. “By invoking and dissolving these familiar emblems, Locke seeks to draw attention to the language of power that is hidden in plain sight in our everyday lives,” the note states. Since 2005, Locke “has been making ‘impossible proposals’ to reinterpret historical statues.” He has taken photographs of existing statues and painted them over, “giving them new patterns, costumes, and symbols with which he sought to draw attention to the brutal histories behind the figures.” After the financial crash of 2008, Locke bought share certificates from the 19th and early 20th centuries in companies ranging from textiles to railroads in to “paint them over with his own imagery.” The intent was to “amplify the printed designs already on the page” and “illuminate the dark histories behind them,” of resource extraction and exploitation.
But Locke also offers more than critique. His “ambassador” sculptures “appear to be part sculpture, part living being,” festooned with “historic and invented symbols, colonial medals, old currencies, coats of arms, ghostly figures, and skulls.” Locke “offers a counterpoint to public forms of commemoration and questions whom society chooses to memorialize.”
The “counterpoint” the notes suggest is, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, a way to move past the frame the YCBA has supplied for Locke, as helpful as it is to navigate his vibrant work. If you don’t read any of the accompanying text and just approach the works directly, you encounter stuff that moves beyond protest or critique, and into a zone of artistry in which heady emotions and a riot of ideas collide.
It begins with the ships in the lobby, which, in addition to being stuffed with culture and history, also drip with life. It’s all too possible to imagine The Survivor as having survived a million adventures — some harrowing, some hilarious. You want to know who the passengers were, what fortunes they may have had and lost, what befell them after they left the ship behind. In a similar vein, Saturn isn’t just a trenchant, angry piece. In its phantasmagoric texture, its rich cacophony of images, it comes across as a figure from a new, syncretic religion that is perhaps just starting to gain followers, but in 20 years might be on every street corner, preaching a new kind of gospel. Ambassador 4, meanwhile, seems to hail from a nation not entirely of this world, and this ambassador rides proud, the dignitary from a country that doesn’t make excuses for itself.
It all adds up to a picture of an artist who lives between two worlds, and using his distinct perspective not just to critique the past and present, but to model how to plunge headlong into the future. That future, Locke’s work suggests, is by necessity tied to the past, but it doesn’t have to replicate it. And each piece in the exhibit radiates with a conviction that it’s the people on the ground now who see the problems we face most clearly, and that clarity is as much of an advantage as money or power in knowing what to do with the challenges before us. While billionaires are building bunkers and stockpiling cans, a lot of other people are turning to the communities around them, and reaching deep into their cultures, to build something new. And maybe in the end, locking arms with our neighbors is a better survival tactic than building a wall.
“Hew Locke: Passages” runs at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., through Jan. 11. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.
