This feature highlights a different local artist each week. Got someone in mind you think deserves the spotlight? Hit us up at [email protected].
Artist of the week: Ricky Weaver
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” a white wall at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery reads. The gallery feels sterile, like a hallowed, consecrated place.
Photos of a Black woman dressed in a silky black garment grace the walls. The focus is on her hands, adorned with rings and long, black stiletto nails. She’s the Virgin Mary of Black femininity. She touches her chest lovingly and makes hand gestures that anyone who grew up Black will recognize.
The photos are of Ypsilanti artist Ricky Weaver, though she doesn’t consider them self-portraits. The skilled photographer describes them as “image-based objects trafficking in the grammar of black feminist futurity.”
These photos are part of Weaver’s solo show at the gallery titled Crucify My Flesh. She takes us to church with two series “Untitled, On the Mainline (Anthem)” and “Untitled, I Sound Like Momma’N’Em (Care and Council).” The former is named after the hymn “Jesus on the Mainline” but instead of Jesus, we’re praying to Black women.
“I think of it as an embodied sort of prayer,” Weaver tells Metro Times about the hand gestures in her photos. “What is expressed and implied by the language of Black women’s everyday spirituality? People kept asking me, ‘Is this sign language?’ In a way, yeah. But I’m thinking more about the way that language can be embodied. Language can act as a ‘dark sousveillance’ technique. That’s the way they invade the archive of the everyday. I like the fact that I can’t say exactly what they mean because that defeats the purpose.”
“Dark sousveillance” is a term coined by writer and researcher Simone Browne that describes how enslaved Africans created their own coded language to “disappear” from surveillance.
A second room of the gallery turns into a ritual space with a skyring portal Weaver created with reflective glass, soil, and vials of water she calls “Let The Circle Be Unbroken.” Photos of her oldest daughter braiding her youngest’s hair surround it.
“Spirit is the thing that escapes the form,” Weaver says. “I think about the ways that we make sure the circle remains unbroken and to me, that’s through the everyday spiritual. Everything in that space is spiritual. Getting your hair braided is a spiritual activity, having an embodied coded language is a spiritual knowing. It’s looking back at yourself, navigating the politics of looking but also skyring past, present, future. So letting the circle be unbroken requires a nonlinear sort of temporality.”
She adds, “there’s an energetic transfer when you’re getting your hair braided and I was always told you don’t just let anybody do your hair. I think about the body as a central mechanism for archiving, uploading, downloading, and transferring information.”
Weaver is from Ypsilanti and is currently a teaching fellow at ArtCenter College of Art and Design in Pasadena, California. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her work has been exhibited locally and internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, among others.
Where to see her work: Crucify My Flesh is on view at David Klein Gallery until April 1; 1520 Washington Blvd., Detroit; 313-818-3416; dkgallery.com.
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