SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY: Jonathan Allen and Michael Paul Britto
Curated by Sara Reisman
November 21 - December 21, 2024
BronxArtSpace is pleased to announce the opening of SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY, a two-person exhibition curated by Sara Reisman, featuring recent work by visual artists Michael Paul Britto and Jonathan Allen whose distinct but complementary practices converge around the politics of civic life, each approaching that which is public by connecting the personal with the political, and the particular with the universal. Working in collage, text, public address, video, and installation, Allen and Britto question what it means, in this pivotal time, to be on the right side of history, and how to really see our country for what it is, a flawed democracy, the course of which has shifted away from historically democratic safeguards.
Allen’s text-based series of public interventions hail passersby to reflect on our collective political condition, with an emphasis on the forms of agency we embody in particular in times of crisis. Britto’s recent collages powerfully explore the lived experiences of people of color in the United States, which he draws from deeply invested relationships that emerge from his work a public school teacher and his mentorship of youth living in the New York City Housing Authority. The public aspect of each artist’s approach operates at different scales: Allen’s Interruptions are literally situated within the advertising surfaces in public spaces of circulation, whereas Britto’s collages and projections reflect on the experiences of the very youth he works with in public school and public housing. Bridging language and figure, the two artists create a potent dialogue that merges personal stories of resiliency with broader calls to action and solidarity.
Begun in 2017, Allen’s Interruptions series are real time interventions into the surfaces of street advertisements, temporarily installed for an incidental audience. Often destroyed within hours of installation, more than 370 unique interventions have been installed as part of this project. These works form a window into the United States’ social and political struggles since the first Trump presidency. His messages - calls for access to health care, environmental protection, and a ceasefire in Gaza, among others - take on new urgency as we enter a new presidential administration. Britto’s collages and projections from his NYCHA series hone in on individual experience, contrasting silhouettes of people with the architecture of New York City public housing, and the interior architecture of the gallery. The uneasy tension between these posturing figures and the spaces they inhabit is amplified by intricately cut and seamlessly collaged magazine advertisements. Together the artists push against the boundaries of the systems of circulation that define our everyday movements, questioning how we might resist the commodification that subsumes daily life, both on screen and in the built environment.
SEE THIS COUNTRY CLEARLY builds on Allen and Britto’s recent exhibition at PS122 Gallery titled SEE YOUR COUNTRY CLEARLY, which functioned as space for reflection and hope leading up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The titles of both showsd refer to a speech by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Boy Interrupted: American Plunder and the Incomplete Life of Jordan Davis, which implores the audience to educate themselves on the history, politics, and social conditions of life in the United States. Having closed the weekend after the election results came in, many visitors experienced the previous exhibition with a heightened sense of urgency, understanding a new sense of vulnerability across many cultural communities in New York City. This new iteration of the exhibition is distinct from the previous show at PS122 Gallery where each artist had a solo presention, and includes additional artworks by Britto and Allen, bringing their practices into more direct dialogue within Bronx Art Space’s gallery.
