Thank you for reading the Intermedium travel experience guidebook. You’ve come a long way, and we have quite the journey ahead of us.
We’re going to be traveling through Detroit artist Bakpak Durden’s latest exhibit Intermedium at the University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery. In this exhibit, the artist has developed a series of paintings, photos, and poetry scribbled on the side of their canvases that exist in the spaces between hope and hopelessness. Here, home is an illusion of space and time, instead of a safe place to rest.
This exhibit has depressive undertones, though they don’t feel oppressively heavy, as the artist’s struggles with suicidal ideation weave in and out of melancholy and solace.
“[Intrusive thoughts] are something I deal with every day,” Durden says. “There’s this tendency to avoid talking about suicide or needing to just leave or go away and having that be the only reprieve from the day-to-day of it all… But there’s a through line in all my work and that is transformation and transmutation. That’s surrendering, letting go so you can make way for new and bigger things. It’s the idea that time passes and that eventually it will work itself out.”
Intermedium is part of the Stamps Gallery’s annual Envision: Michigan Artist Initiative, which puts out an open call for art and shortlists three emerging or mid-career artists for a group exhibition. Durden was one of the finalists chosen for the 2023 cohort alongside filmmaker Parisa Ghaderi and Armenian-American weaver Levon Kafafian. The winning artist will be announced at a ceremony on June 29 where they’ll receive a $5,000 prize.
Paintings like “Sēdibus (pre) Frontalis” show the points where present, past, and future meet with segments of Durden in black and gray overlapping a full-color portrait as they sit in their truck.
The truck is a focal point for several of the paintings and photographs on this voyage, which at a low point in their life, was the only place they felt safe.
“Leaving to just ride in my truck was my only safety because I didn’t have a place to be,” they say. “Being in my truck and calling hotlines or calling people, whose names have been redacted on the side of the [canvas], was my way of tapping in and making sure that someone knew I was OK. But also, I didn’t have to say exactly what I was going through if I wasn’t ready.”
In another piece, “Cerebellum Fixi,” Durden appears to be taking off a jacket as they enter their home. Or are they putting the jacket on as they leave? Are they coming or leaving? Are they surrendering to the warm embrace of death or tugging at the frayed seams of relationships and places that keep them anchored? The story doesn’t have to be linear. During your visit, think of all these moments in time existing simultaneously.
A message on the side of this piece fixates on the word “fix” with a story about Durden’s grandmother. It reads, in part, “I remember my grandmother always saying she was fixin’ ta do something or fixin’ ta go somewhere. She was the only person I knew that I said it (at the time). So naturally, I thought it very special & important (still do). I could never fix my mouth to utter the words I didn’t think mine to say.”
“It’s the idea that ‘fixing’ myself is not something I could do,” Durden explains of the play on words, telling us, “I’ve got plenty of friends who are trans or whatever and I remember when I was younger I would say, ‘I’m so proud of what you’re doing, I just could never do it.’ They’d ask why, and I’d come up with excuses that were only circumstantial, just because of the circumstances that I was in, not because it wasn’t in my power to do it. So I started to interrogate what made me comfortable in these uncomfortable circumstances.”
If you get lost on your journey, find the information cards with the travel information hotline phone number, where you can choose the sequence you want to experience the exhibit.
Each painting has a corresponding number on the hotline’s menu and a prompt that will lead you deeper into the memories floating around in Durden’s consciousness. For example, dialing the hotline and pressing “1” for their painting “Cornu Fraternis” and then choosing option “4” takes you to a moment where Durden calls a friend from their car and says “I had that thought again.” Pressing “1” and then “5” leads you to a crisis hotline.
In “Cornu Fraternis,” Durden sits in their truck again as they make a phone call with an ammonite fossil, perhaps the only moment of stillness in the exhibit — a pause as you contemplate where to go next.
Don’t forget to write your chosen sequence down and leave it in the mailbox to assist fellow travelers who will make their trip after you.
Durden’s exhibits are often open-ended questions, where you choose the order the paintings should go in and create your own narrative.
Intermedium is supposed to be a break in between their Eye of Horus show at Cranbrook Art Museum earlier this year and whatever their next big project is (which they wouldn’t give us details about in classic, cryptic Bakpak Durden fashion). This highly conceptual project is anything but a reprieve, however, as it leaves more questions than answers on this story of escapism Durden is trying to tell us.
They don’t do much to lead museum-goers… we mean travelers… down a specific road from beginning to end, either. Instead, they’re like an omnipresent creator who has birthed this work of art, left it behind for humanity, and given us free will to decide which path to take.
A question on the information cards poses the question to travelers, “Where are we going?”
We’re not entirely sure where we are going. All we know is, wherever Durden is headed, we want to be along for the ride.
Where to see their work: Intermedium will be on display as part of Envision: Michigan Artist Initiative 2023 until July 29 at the University of Michigan Stamps Gallery, 201 South Division St., Ann Arbor, stamps.umich.edu.
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