Spotlight: Umar Rashid

NOVEMBER 16-DECEMBER 10, 2022

The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, scholars, poets, etc. In its seventh iteration, the Spotlight features Umar Rashid’s Legio V meets the Gucci Gang in the Sonoran Desert after a bloody skirmish and become lost to time. The colors that make purple, 2022, with a text by FLAG’s Director Jonathan Rider.

Time Traveler: On Umar Rashid’s Legio V meets the Gucci Gang in the Sonoran Desert after a bloody skirmish and become lost to time. The colors that make purple, 2022

By Jonathan Rider

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

With red solo cups and muskets in hand, eight men half-dressed in soldiers’ uniforms party at the edge of a desert oasis. Split into two groups of four on opposite banks of the water, the factions wear either red bandanas and Gucci boots/underwear (on the left) or blue bandanas and Louis Vuitton boots/underwear (on the right)—a Blood versus Crip, Republican versus Democrat, Kering versus LVMH battle royale. At the center of the symmetric composition, and indifferent to the soldiers surrounding them, two recumbent, naked figures make out in a pale blue pool; a cigarette dangles from one of their fingers while another, unlit, waits in the wings behind the other’s ear. Two, arm-in-arm silhouetted human forms rise from behind the couple while, in a cloudless sky, a giant, faceted crystal-like structure hovers above all the players in this scene.

In boxy, yellow text, the words ‘OASES’ and ‘O OASES’ float over the image, yet the accompanying text by the artist Umar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) identifies this as a mirage, i.e., an illusion: Marvel at this world. This miraculous mirage. Rejoice and awe at this opulent oasis where the crystal castle stretches from here to eternity. Thus, these wretched and lost souls may find a way, away from this wasteland created by the avarice and greed of their colonial masters and in some small part, the tiny pocket of darkness in us all that threatens to consume everything. May they be remembered.

Separated from their battalions—Are these men deserters? What war is this?—the soldiers are lost in the Sonoran Desert[1], susceptible to one another (Lord of the Flies[2]), exposure (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket[3]), and desperation (Alive[4]); they’ll all likely die out here. Considering their shared fate, what if the mirage, with its intimations of sex, escape, and maybe even grace, is a final happiness, a divine beneficence? Whatever chain of events and circumstances conspired to bring these men here (to die), it’s unclear when this all takes place. Plastic solo cups, colonial-era muskets, soldiers kitted out in crisp designer logos and technicolor hair, are all of different times, but exist here at the exact same moment, in an unlikely melding of the Napoleonic Wars, Tibetan thangka painting, Mad Max, spring break, and the Last Judgment.

In the fantasy space of painting where almost anything can happen—even time collapsing—colonialism, racial inequity, violence, and erasure are ever-present for Rashid, not just in Legio V meets the Gucci Gang… but writ large throughout his practice. In a simple but tectonic reversal, the artist forefronts Black and brown characters in what would historically be white/Euro-centric roles of power. That shift, presented in the guise and scale of history painting, is gravitational and begets all kinds of questions about what a reimagined past would mean for a very real present and future. Of course, there are no answers, but perhaps the simple act of asking the question is enough to think about what that difference could or might possibly look like. And it would look different.

But inside the painting is a forever now for its soldiers. Paradoxically, we postulate their inevitable fate as we witness them, very much alive, eternally young, and partying at the edge of dessert paradise. It’s both reassuring and absurd, but despite whatever brought them here, they seem joyful and at least have one another.

Footnotes:
[1] Covering approximately 100,000 square miles, the Sonoran Desert extends through southwestern Arizona and southeastern California, as well as most of Baja California and the western half of the state of Sonora, Mexico.
[2] Written by William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954) is novel that concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves.
[3] The only complete novel by Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) recounts the misadventures of the young New Englander Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus and faces shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he meets a mysterious end.
[4] Based on Piers Paul Read's book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), Alive (1993) is an American biographical survival drama film that recounts the story of the Uruguayan rugby team's crash-landing into the Andes mountains on October 13, 1972, during which the survivors had no choice but to turn to desperate measures in order to live.

About:

Umar Rashid (b. 1976) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Rashid received a BA in cinema and photography from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, in 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include Ancien Regime Change 4, 5, and 6, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2022); Ancien Regime Change part 3: The men who sold the world, Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2022); Ancien Regime Change Part Two. En Germinal: Les Printemps de Guerre, Almine Rech, Paris, France (2022); En Garde / On God, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2021); among others. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently including Anyone Can Move a Mountain, Maus Contemporary, Birmingham, AL (2022); House Parté II: The Final Salé, Carlye Packer, Palm Springs, CA (2022); Pictus Porrectus: Reconsidering the Full Length Portrait, Art & Newport, Isaac Bell House, Newport, RI (2022); Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); among others. His work was featured at The Huntington and the Hammer Museum as part of the biennial Made in LA 2020: a version. Rashid’s work is represented in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Jorge Pérez Collection, Miami, FL; Mount Holyoke Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, among others.

Jonathan Rider (b. 1983) is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York, NY. Rider is the Director at The FLAG Art Foundation, where he has worked since 2014, and has organized solo presentations by artists Kamrooz Aram, Cynthia Daignault, Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, Elmgreen & Dragset, Genevieve Gaignard, Sam Gilliam, among others, and thematic group exhibitions, including and I will wear you in my heart of heart, Dime-Store Alchemy, In Search of the Miraculous, and The Times. Previously, he was the Assistant Curator at Art in General from 2011–14. Rider received a BA from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, in 2005, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, in 2011. His artwork has been shown in exhibitions including Notturno Più, The Pool NYC, Venice, Italy (2019); Microwave X, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Costante Colore, The Pool NYC, Milan, Italy (2017); Chaos/Control, MW Project Space, New York, NY (2017); among others. His writing has appeared in Art in America.

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