Ina Archer at The Armory Show
Focus Section, F27
September 7-10, 2023
Javits Center, New York
Microscope is very pleased to participate in the Focus Section of The Armory Show 2023, curated by Candice Hopkins, with a solo booth of new works by Ina Archer.
Making its debut at the fair is a new series of larger scale (45 x 30”) handmade works on paper in which Archer explores storytelling based on personal narratives, family history and film scenarios all of which connect to the broader Black experience. A cast of characters that includes “dolls, family members, actors, locations, homes, and memories” populate these works for which the artist assumes the role of an unreliable narrator. A variety of materials and techniques are employed in the series, spanning from collage and watercolor to silkscreen printing, from cut outs of original and family photographs to vintage sheet music and wallpaper.
New watercolors from an ongoing series by Archer feature portraits of racially-charged objects — such as Topsy-Turvy dolls, golli dolls, ceramics, vases, and other objects — that the artist has acquired over the years from vintage stores in the US and abroad, as well as online. By removing the collectable from the market and the public exchange and by softening the stereotypical features her intent is to “liberate” the object from new cycles of ownership that prolong the effects of their symbology.
Similarly, Archer turns her attention to advertising and the film industry in new works from the series “Still a Bruh,” which uses as its starting point the 1968 William Greaves documentary “Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class.” These works — which are based on historical film stills, photos, and product logos that Archer has reimagined and transformed in part — seek to convey the notion that no matter how charged or difficult the underlying image may be, it is still invited to be a part of the complex imagery of Blackness.
Lastly, the multi-media installation “Osmundine (Orchid Slap)” is based around and features the historic scene from the 1967 multi-Oscar-winning film “In the Heat of the Night,” in which Mr. Tibbs, a police detective played by Sidney Poitier, returns a slap from a plantation owner: the first time that a black man strikes a white man in an American movie.
In the scene, which takes place in an orchid greenhouse, Archer “mashes up and prolongs” the moment through repetition in a video projection — that also incorporates footage from the movie “The Wiz” — onto a small area of a screen-like collage, which sits in the center of the largest of three predominantly framed watercolor, ink and collage on paper works featuring orchids and other flowers that form the installation.
For further information please contact the gallery at inquiries@microscopegallery or by phone at 347.925.1433.
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Ina Archer is an artist working primarily with the mediums of drawing, collage, moving image, and installation, whose work examines the intersections of race/ethnicity, representation, and technology. Her works have been shown at institutions including Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; White Columns, NY; The List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Portland Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and many others. Her work has been recently reviewed in ArtForum, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, among others.
Archer was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study and has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA), Harvestworks; Anonymous Was A Woman, and the American Academy in Rome. Archer received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University (NYU). She was born in Paris, France and currently lives and works between Washington DC and Brooklyn, NY.
