FOLKLORE | Seck's Exhibition Debut in Nashville, Tennessee with Sequitur Cinema
Evan Dale + Alberto Aliaga // Nov 9, 2021
There’s a harmonious existence between the humming in a string of fluorescent light bulbs and a series of canvases that have been painted over again and again in search of something perhaps unattainable ever in art; perhaps only attainable through art by way of the well-balanced imperfection of an exhibition like FOLKLORE at a gallery space like Tucker’s Automed. Raw, dusty, and flooded with light at golden hour, Tucker’s – just a short drive out South of Downtown Nashville, Tennessee – is an old automotive shop that in many ways feels only halfway deconstructed from its original resolve. No cars, no machinery, no glass, and no metal aside from the corrugated steel sheet of the floor-to-ceiling pull-down garage doors, the place is a skeleton that still echoes of its original form, but has, at the hands of Nashville-based creative collective, Sequitur Cinema, found a new one. Open floorplan and a manager’s office turned walk-up bar and merch window, it’s now a uniquely comfortable gallery space. And in its identity of in-between, pointedly incomplete transformation of use, it offers a juxtaposition to any art adorning the walls that’s different than the established norms of what a gallery can and should be. Painted, polished, and provocative, pieces here exist not atop a smooth white backdrop, but on a textured wall of grey, grease-stained brick. In so many ways, the art hung here, as opposed to the aesthetic of a traditional gallery, feels simultaneously more-so connected to the space in spirit, yet further removed from the walls through their aesthetic born from purpose. With an essence of graffiti from the hands of a master having been pulled from the forgotten walls of an abandoned structure in a neighborhood – like so many in Nashville – gleaming with the scars of gentrification, Tucker’s – hand-in-hand with the art exhibited there – stands in defiance of Nashville’s conflicted present. Weathered, worn, gashed, and unfinished, perhaps the better word for the environment would be real.
But, beyond a case to be made that perhaps all galleries should boast a more honest, repurposed identity so as the art held within can communicate with the truth and beauty of the space itself, there is a case to be made, too, that Seck – a multihyphenate artist in the broadest sense of the term who splits his rooted identity between Senegal, New York City, and Nashville – would prove his debut installation, FOLKLORE, connected deeply to the id of any gallery, anywhere. It draws from his own roots, the inner roots of the exhibition that in turn dig deep into the space they inhabit; dig deep into the space the art inevitably fills in a viewer’s own peace of mind. And at the furthest depth of those roots, Seck’s roots and FOLKLORE’s, too, come into the clearest of focus. And yet, that focus – those roots – are not mutually exclusive of FOLKLORE’s meaning, nor are they a causation for depth.
‘For me, identity is always important. I’m not saying that you have to look at my work and see me in it, but somehow a part of me belongs on it. And I feel like that could be the reason that I draw the way I do. When I used to draw cartoons and stuff, I was just bored, and it was just doodles. Now I actually draw with intention. Now that I have this style, and this that I want to convey, and this that I want to do, the intention is there, so the Senegalese roots play a part in it.’
Speaking on drawing in particular, in which began Seck’s first real connection to the exploration of his own creative pallet during his youth in Senegal, he’s also speaking on the broad mosaic of art on display at FOLKLORE. ‘I can’t explain it, but a lot of this work feels weird, and it just feels African. The drawings remind me of African masks,’ he mentioned several time throughout our conversation, pointing to the sketched, intriguingly friendly figures in his paintings, the words etched into the colorful spaces around them, and the message that either does or does not exist to him and his viewers as they see fit.
In the small, hollow shell that is Tucker’s, ripe for hosting a statement to be made while simultaneously making a statement of its own, Seck’s art spans the sliding scales of color, detail, texture, and medium, filling the space with an indefinable glimpse into his own wide-ranging creative mind. Before the masses arrived, hungry for their own glimpse into the mind of an emerging audiovisual name-to-be-known, only Seck and the occasional Sequitur teammate shared the space with streaks of sunsetting light and rising artwork that in and of itself dances with an unending conversation on color. Reds, blues, whites, yellows, and greens all share their space on the walls, and help to frame a story. But Black is the story.
‘FOLKLORE explores the Black experience through the lens of painting, film and digital art.’ So reads the press release from Sequitur and more intuitively, so reads the room. A painting in particular – hung at the right edge of the largest exhibition wall, depicts Black Hollywood stereotypes in a way that came to Seck while he was watching a documentary on the subject. Bleeding of an inescapable intention to evoke a reaction in his audience, the piece sets a precedent and makes a statement that isn’t outwardly repeated, but innately explored throughout the rest of the FOLKLORE canon. ‘There’s not a message there, and if there is, they can make up their own,’ Seck continued when explaining his vision for the project and what he hopes it’ll come to mean to his audience, without defining the existence of a true meaning or particular depth to his work. ‘I can only tell them my experience while making it, but I can’t tell them what the message is.’
Something inherently African and yet something inherently not begins to find even more balance as one stand in the middle of the gallery with their eye continuing to circle leftward. His African roots in drawing and painting move into an ode to calligraphy and graffiti overtop moments of installation on walls and on gallery floor. In collaboration with Leslie Borg, two stills pulled from the depth of his audiovisual music video canon find themselves paper plastered to the next wall counterclockwise. Here, a marriage between his painting and his cinematographic eye – a marriage, too, between his early creative roots drawing in Senegal with his more recent endeavors expressing the vision of music through the underground of Nashville’s hip-hop oriented renaissance – share space and overlap, speaking towards a certain fluidity in his artistic process. And that transition only continues further counterclockwise.
In the middle of the floor – en medias res, if the audience takes the entire exhibition as one story – Seck’s story – being told – the story perhaps finds its beginning in its middle, where an installation of televisions and DVD players play in a loop Seck’s short film, free, which premiered earlier this year at a VSNR gallery in North Nashville. Unavoidably so, the free installation immediately captures one’s attention on arrival, and moving right – moving East – maneuvers an audience’s eye towards Seck’s roots, and towards art more and more harmonized with an intention on African and Black statement; moving left – moving West – opens up a new realm of artistic opportunity where post-it-note illustrations for sale and graffitied murals adorned directly onto the greasy walls of Tucker’s begin to tell a story buried in a new chapter. And in turn, that cycle ends and starts again with Seck’s artist statement, quietly adorned on the wall near the gallery entrance. It feels unavoidably circular.
‘My art reflects the surreal Black experience. As Black artists, we often face continuous expectations to make work that is deep (even down to this mission statement). Art is therapeutic for me. Therefore, I choose to simply make art, to express my unique imagination. What you’re seeing is a series of ideas that struck me while I was painting. Sometimes those ideas are permanent, others I may paint over a few seconds after. But that’s folklore.’
FOLKLORE, it would seem, evokes in its audience the very mystère et magique that one would take from its nom du gallérie. Inherently immersive, but uniquely so by way of the counterculture setting in Tucker’s grimy identity, one is hard-pressed – as would seem Seck’s goal – to find one striking, cohesive statement in his work. Instead – in a much more challenging feat to achieve – FOLKLORE follows the path of a young man’s wide-ranging creative journey; captures the evolution and circularity in a multihyphenate artist’s mind, and gives us all – if only for a couple of hours – a glimpse into the workings of where he’s been, without a hint at all towards where he could take it all next.
As Seck and Sequitur move on from FOLKLORE’s Nashville debut, NFT’s of his exhibition work are at auction through November 12. And for any of those interested in their purchase, head to the link here.
Finally, Seck would like to thank his family, Leslie Borg, Annie Moore, Daniel Grossman, Denis Deck, Cody Nailor, Doughjoe, and Lina Silvers for everything that FOLKLORE turned out to be.
