Legacy of culture

Every picture tells a story in local artist Radcliffe Bailey’s work, but it’s a story enlarged by the history and context that surround his found objects. An Atlanta artist with ties to Basquiat, folk art and African-American appropriationists like Carrie Mae Weems and Amalia Amaki, Bailey’s epic photographic collages plant some central found image at their center and then unspool a narrative in the photograph’s “frame.” Context, Bailey seems to say, is everything, and in his latest show, Other Worlds at Fay Gold Gallery, the starting point is travel, both literal and metaphorical.
Journeys by railroad and boat and compass points are addressed in Bailey’s image-paintings, as well as more poetic travels such as transcendence of the past, or the sexual passage from girl to woman implied in “Venus,” one of the stronger pieces in the show. At “Venus’s” dead center is an image of young African girls decked in colorful jewelry and saffron robes that could have been lifted from National Geographic. Around that central image, placed behind glass within a large wooden frame, is a shape Bailey has painted to resemble Africa encircled by a contrasting pea green “ocean.” As in many of the works in Other Worlds, curving, serpentine lines bisect the painted surface, suggesting rivers. Again, the motif of passage is implied in water as conduit from one world to another. But these lines’ resemblance to veins and bloodlines also suggests a kind of biological “travel” across generations.
At almost every turn Bailey alludes to the African diaspora, often overtly, in pages torn from books of slave testimony applied to the image surface as in “Night Time Narratives,” or more cryptically in tobacco leaves lacquered onto the object’s surface and in the constant allusions to travel and movement.
The themes in Bailey’s work are familiar enough — continuing motifs begun in his earlier work — but also connected to other African-American artists who work to valorize a marginal culture. In many ways, more than the trope of music that critics have used to describe Bailey’s work, the analogy to films seems more vital. With their montage of symbols and signs and incorporation of various media, Bailey’s works recall the impressionist filmmaking style of Julie Dash or Camille Billops, and the former’s desire in a work like Daughters of the Dust to convey a sense of romance and magic and dignity to historically overlooked people. Bailey seems, in this way, the ideal Atlanta artist. His blackness roots him in a complicated regional context far from the ahistoric blandness so aggressively strived for in the New McSouth, but the sense of tribute and transcendence in his works seems more about progress than regression — which is, ironically, a distinctive characteristic of Atlanta’s civic pride.
More Charles Burnett than Spike Lee, Bailey is not so much addressing new material in his most recent show at Fay Gold Gallery as he is reasserting issues found in his previous work. Finding a glory and hope in material other generations have placed within a narrative of suffering and rage, the particular slant of Bailey’s work seems a reflection of his youth, and again, of the city where he lives.
Bailey’s greatest skill may be a unique, hard-to-achieve balance that other local artists who also traffic in the often beaten-to-a-bloody-pulp vernacular of found photographs and contested histories have not achieved. His works are purposefully ambiguous but have enough narrative cohesion and continuity that they can’t be faulted for the “more is more” aesthetic so popular in local circles where as many images and objects as possible are thrown into the mix.
Many of the ploys Bailey uses are emotionally loaded and manipulative on the surface; few vintage photographs of babies or serious, dignified couples in fancy clothes aren’t able to tug at the sensorial heartstrings and inspire an instantaneous emotional response. But when these ghosts from the past are black, they carry the additional assumed baggage of hardship and pain. Bailey somehow manages to avoid the pitfalls of pure sentimentality, though often just barely. In the past, his work has often gone overboard — especially in his use of children and motifs of the religious shrine and icon. In refusing to reduce black Americans to victims, he instead, in such cases, establishes them as angels and saints. But both approaches are probably inconsistent with the complexities of individual, human reality.
In Other Worlds the allusion is to the “other” of African-American experience. But Bailey also overlays the work with a cosmic mysticism that transcends earthly pain as in “Night Time Narratives,” which juxtaposes images of African sculpture and the cosmos. The earthly and human collides with the eternal and universal in a show that makes a spiritual connection between the two. In Bailey’s work, worldly suffering pales next to the legacy of culture: The wooden fertility figures, the babies, the mechanics posed by a steam engine that populate his work speak to a humanity that transcends the bonds of earthly captivity.
Bailey’s work may be so popular in a New South resistant to overt statements of black nationalism or rage, because like Julie Dash, rather than wallowing in trouble, Bailey looks outward and upward, making a connection between the molecular and the celestial. Images of the solar system, of tribal totems and daguerreotypes seem to assert that individuals are not reducible to their painful, personal histories but assume a place in the eternal cultural record — and that in the act of documenting their lives, Bailey’s work is done in the service of transcendence.
Other Worlds runs through Dec. 5 at Fay Gold Gallery, 764 Miami Circle. 404-233-3843. Tues.-Sat. 9:30 a.m.- 5:30 p.m.