Noise / Grain
ILY2 Gallery
September 13–November 9, 2024
Portland, Oregon
The first impression of Noise / Grain evokes a void. ILY2, the gallery showing Timothy Yanick Hunter’s new solo exhibition, seems almost entirely empty, with just a few small works interrupting the white walls. This layout is, of course, intentional; with a short stroll through the space one understands more pieces are hiding in plain sight. Three videos face the exterior of the building, creating an experimental storefront that converts the street into a glass arcade and turns the gallery inside-out. Another video is tightly pressed into the fissure between two drywall dividers. And yet another, Forward Scatter (2024), is concealed behind a prepared corner, visible only from a precise angle. This video repeats on a loop a three-second scene of a man in sunglasses pointing a strange, blinking device at the camera, as if he photographed the spectator, capturing them at the same moment they also capture him.
Like stalkers, we keep searching through the gaps of this deceptive architecture, afforded by ILY2’s set of modular, rotating walls. Slowly, the formal blankness of the gallery’s diagram emerges in Hunter’s own work. The soundscape is a plunderphonic mélange of upbeat disco, soul, and funk songs that have been distorted, stretched, pitch-bent, looped, and layered to the point of disfigurement. The videos recall Arthur Jafa’s sublime jump cuts, quickly remediating archival footage of undisclosed origins, found scattered in weird junctions of the internet. It’s easy to sense a core leitmotif all around: the deconstruction of the Black subject. Hunter is a first-generation Jamaican in Toronto, a city that boomed with Caribbean immigration in the 1960s. His art is influenced by dub, the Jamaican genre that gave birth to hip-hop sampling. The influence of versioning and remix is evident not only in the music Hunter plays but in the terminology of the exhibition text and in the setup of a performance he did at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) to open the exhibition. In it, a DJ mixing board becomes the chronotope for the live montage of the films displayed at ILY2, in a mode of imagistic turntablism.
The main work Hunter wielded as raw material in this remix performance is also the centerpiece of the ILY2 exhibition, Stereo As a Prefix (2024), a five-minute film mounted on the ceiling of the gallery. His previous big solo show, at Cooper Cole gallery in 2021, used the floor heavily to showcase a variety of works; this time, Hunter wanted to invert the landscape and invite the spectator to look up instead. Stereo As a Prefix projects a series of disorienting time lapses of upper shots of a nautical port: the tops of boats drifting back and forth, a flock of birds wheeling at insane speed, the gray sky contrasting with the golden metal of the ceiling. Then the video is rapidly interspersed by counterposing images: a woman whose face disintegrates through collages, phasings, and other explorations of the geometries of the human figure; a display of Jamaican sceneries saturated to the point of cartoonish splendor under an infomercial-like text denouncing the horrors of slavery; a tele-priest being forced by the vortex of the editing process to dance jungle. The whole audio that wraps the screen is an experiment in electronic composition, with hypnagogic pop textures, dreamy ambient timbres, intermittent spaced-out beats, and ghostly background voices pouring into the gallery from above.
The tracks, like the videos, are galvanized by the power of the glitch. After all, noise and grain are both a form of glitch, the result of a friction between content and media that reveals the very limits of that media. Philosopher Fred Moten calls this “the break,” and likens it to the Afro-diasporic existential condition. In True and Functional (2023), this association becomes explicit, the literal and the metaphorical breaks coalesce, as sudden inversions and dense accommodations, multiplications, deletions, distensions, delays, and all kinds of manipulations of temporality reiterate, for instance, an excerpt from artist Xenobia Bailey talking about the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, or an Ethiopian student demonstration, or footage of Miles Davis in Milan, or Rosa Parks speaking on Baptist Churches. The inhuman samples of bubbling tones and melancholic arpeggios also mimic the inhuman crowds marching in homogenous masses like organic aggregates of frictions.
Besides the main videos, the exhibition shows a series of Hunter’s dye sublimation prints. Designed on software, they recall the molecular pixels of LCD monitors as well as paintings that have been overrun with dozens of impastos by a digital palette knife. In Remote Viewing (2024) and Untitled (Portrait) (2024), punctures crack the Black body in inconceivable fragments, like monsters extracted from an imaginary Michael Snow piece. In Gradient Noise (2024) and Altitude (2024), even more abstract schemes of colors, reminiscent of Lisa Alvarado’s textiles, mingle with imploded mouths and arms, like puzzles or tangrams from a coloring book. The break is once again spotlighted as we find the parallels between inconsistencies in the fabric, in the screen, and in the skin: all porous membranes, full of black holes. The last impression of Noise / Grain evokes a void.