Vaughn Spann Vaughn Spann
(b. Orlando, FL 1992)
Lives and works in New Haven, CT
Slip and Slide (McKinney Pool Palette), 2018, Terry cloth, acrylic polymer paint, oil paint, paper and canvas on stretcher bars.
Collection of Dr. Robert B. Feldman
The shifting gaze, sighted in black experience here, is brilliantly embodied through abstraction, materiality, and tactile labor manifest in the surface and composition of Slip and Slide (McKinney Pool Palette). The title signifies the dark content, social injustice, and devaluing of black lives that belies the tactile, built up surface in near sculptural relief. The layered abstraction references the violent incident known as the “McKinney pool party” that occurred in 2015 in McKinney, Texas during which, among other things, a white police officer, Eric Casebolt, yanked by the arm and restrained a 15-year-old African American girl, wearing only a bikini, harshly to the ground and then knelt on her back. The officer also unholstered his firearm, drew it to ready position and chased teenage boys as they approached him while he was trying to control the girl. The nation responded with outrage over how hundreds of teenagers, mostly of color, were not a legal threat to anyone but were treated like violent criminals. Spann frames the narrative through the grid, geometry, and a reference to hard-edge abstraction, that actually act as vessels for content, as carriers of other ignored or missing narratives. Tellingly a reconstruction of the body, the self, of racism, and of violence is interwoven across the surface, threaded with soft edges by virtue of the treatment of blue Terry cloth, which echoes the pool. Referencing color field painting and minimalism with an emphasis on color and texture imbues meaning and coded symbolism that packs a powerful punch. The Slip ‘N Slide, a favorite backyard toy is rendered here in black and blue, and represents the police and abuse of power, while the orange and yellow are the colors of the girl’s swimsuit, with loose threads woven through the fragmented pool, a surrogate body in reconstruction (surgically restoring the sewn materials that reference the human body)—a potent symbol of a greater vulnerability. Working with non-traditional materials, Spann challenges Western modes of painting, art history, and color theory while also asking in a social climate of heightened racism, classism, and violence, how we reject such violence and work to redefine power structures.