In Dialogue
The group exhibition Care / Condition / Control, which ends its run at 601Artspace on April 27th, takes its conceptual root, quite literally, in the form of hair. Experienced by different generations, cultures, genders, and identities, one’s relationship to the very follicles that grow from us and upon us is deeply personal and unique to each of us. As each artist mines their own stories from these relationships, Chapman expands upon the inspiration and undertaking of such a complicated and tangled subject. Yasmeen Abdallah interviews curator A.E. Chapman about the ideas behind this show.
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What inspired you to approach this concept, and how did you decide to select the artists and works that you did?
The seeds of this show were planted in 2020 during my master’s studies at Hunter College when I was enrolled in a curatorial practicum researching the 150-year history of the college and its art departments. From this research, I found myself strongly gravitating toward works that incorporated hair and began thinking about all of the stuff packed into it. During that time, I became familiar with the work of Hunter alums Germaine Koh and Oasa DuVerney, including two of the works in the show, Koh’s Fête and DuVerney’s MYLFworks, as well as DuVerney’s My Heart as a Drain Clog that was also considered for the exhibition at 601Artspace but was not possible to be shown.
Fast forward a few years later to Summer 2023, Melissa Stern and I were having coffee, and she mentioned this idea about hair that she was working with during the pandemic. This felt particularly serendipitous to me, given my previous engagement with the subject matter. It was affirming, as was my recent discovery and strong interest in Magdalena Dukiewicz’s work, hair, blood, and steel being her primary materials. Stern then referred me to the 601Artspace open call for proposals, and the gallery ended up offering me a grant to expand my submitted proposal—as I did! Over the course of the next year, the cohort grew from about six proposed artists in the original proposal to sixteen exhibiting artists with works ranging across more than 50 years—Joseph Rodriquez’s self-portrait taken with his first camera in 1971 to Sara Messinger’s documentary photographs of Gen Z captured in late 2024 emphasizing a generational thread of care.
The works selected kind of revealed themselves along the way as the show gestated. Hair is so expansive; so, it was this balance between boundedness and unboundedness. Even though some of the works date back to the 1970s, everything feels very relevant to our contemporary moment (as does the overall context of the 1970s and early 1980s). Hair and history have sticky qualities, residues, and remnants, and have a tendency to reappear in familiar and unexpected places, growing back or repeating. Hair has the ability to act as a vessel for the full spectrum of our human condition. I find the micro and macro capacity of hair and that connection between our individual and collective relationships very interesting. Each strand holds this very specific DNA helix, which carries that DNA with it for perpetuity, literally eternally. I think that’s quite beautiful.
What are the overlaps and intersections across the works that you find interesting within this exhibition?
On the whole, the show presents our relationship to hair as a vehicle for interdependence and collective care within communal networks; yet, in terms of condition and control, it also addresses the duality of hair as a consistent thread in acts of violence such as dealt with in Dukiewicz’s work addressing gender-based violence and then more broadly the fraught roots of how North America as we know it today came to being. This ability for hair to hold space for vulnerability and strength produces a tension that fosters thinking beyond polarization and binary fixedness by emphasizing the fluctuating, interconnected, relational, and mutually contained qualities inherent to these ecosystems of care, condition, and control.
A strong current of intimacy and attention runs through the exhibition. Calli Roche’s All Inclusive, a flogger made of blonde braids finished with aluminum foil and black beads and attached to a handle wrapped in black leather, requires an intimate approach in its making while also facilitating the viewer’s close attention to its intricate artisanship and artistry. Many of the works are small, you really have to get up close with them. Even the larger works Koh’s Fête, and Stern’s idiosyncratic High School Hair drawings, require that close looking.
The lens-based works also interact in uncanny ways with the sculpture surrounding them—there is something about the materiality of hair and photographs in the way they both hold so much history yet also feel very ephemeral. I think they both have a haunting quality as a record, a trace as seen in Rebecca Bair’s PRESSED monotype and John Coplan’s photograph of himself in 1984. They also share an autobiographical quality like in Koh’s Fête and Meryl Meisler’s images. Double Self-Portrait by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman juxtaposed with Trish Tillman’s Character Arc 13 just above the diptych makes a lovely connection between the images and the sculpture. Cristina de Gennaro’s series of Carol images from the Medusa Portraits, in which de Gennaro addresses the social stigmas surrounding women and aging, echoes Dukiewicz’s and Koh’s works in a whole different register.
Can you speak to some of the highlights of the show, and what do you hope people will take away after engaging with the work?
In addition to its wonderful formal assemblage of the archetypal pig tails, iconic vanity mirror, and the nostalgic yet punkish presence of text scrawled on a mirror in classic black marker, I feel it’s very special to have Greer Lankton’s If you can pass for a girl (1985) on display in the Lower East Side as this was Lankton’s neighborhood mainstay in NYC. It presents an anecdotal portrait of Lankton’s life merged with the glamour meets punk aesthetics and approach of the L.E.S. during the 1980s and early 1990s, yet also addresses the viewer in real time and stands up for the greater trans community, a community that has always existed and will continue to do so. In this way, it transcends time and meets our contemporary moment in terms of the precarity of rights and access.
The monumentality of Koh’s Fête, hung like a garland, brings forth sheer joy. She began the piece in 1997, taking the pieces of hair from each haircut that she had from that year through 2021 and sewing those sections to a ribbon that she embroidered the year of each haircut. It has such an immediate impact as you enter the gallery and sets the tone of the show. I love its juxtaposition to Bair’s fantastic site-specific installation Collaboration with the Sun III in the gallery window—Koh’s work memorializing 25 years of hair and Bair’s an ephemeral drawing created with shea butter and coconut-activated charcoal on the window of the gallery. What’s even more exciting is that the ongoing work has two haircuts in the queue to be added after it comes down. Jarrett Key’s Hot Comb No. 3 and Hot Comb No. 4 mark the first time works from this series have been on view in NYC. They are quite stunning. Armando Guadaupe Cortés’ performance activation of Jauiri Kuáti (translating to twin hair) during the opening was quite powerful, and the ephemera of that performance, two pieces of hair cut from the ends of his braided hair, carry the performance with the work. I was also honored that Meisler printed BUTCH FEM BUTCH for the first time as a gelatin-silver traditional dark print especially for the show as one of her images that I requested for the exhibition.
Were there any surprises or anecdotes that you’d like to share about the evolution of this show, from origin to installation?
The weeks leading up to the show were filled with many events beyond our control. Two of the works in the show actually survived separate fires roughly two weeks before they were to be installed. Miraculously, both works were not damaged and could be retrieved for installation. We were very nervous about getting both Bair and Koh’s work from Canada alright as this was right in the thick of tensions between Trump and Canada. It was very touch and go. In fact, PRESSED arrived the morning of install day, doesn’t get closer than that.
I’m grateful for everyone who helped bring this carefully protected idea into being, particularly the entire 601Artspace team led by 601Artspace Director Sara Shaoul and Founder David Howe. Thank you.
Care / Condition / Control at 601Artspace @601_artspace
On view through: April 27, 2025
Closing celebration: April 26th, 6-8PM
Curated by: A. E. Chapman @ash_ash_ash
Featuring: Rebecca Bair, John Coplans, Armando Guadalupe, Cortés Cristina de Gennaro, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Oasa DuVernay, Jarrett Key, Greer Lankton, Meryl Meisler, Sara Messinger, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, Calli Roche, Joseph Rodriguez, Cindy Sherman, Melissa Stern, Trish Tillman