Caitlin Cherry: Eigengrau

In her multifaceted practice, Caitlin Cherry coalesces painting, sculpture and installation into articulate and alluring representations of Black femininity. Filtering media through layers of digital manipulation, Cherry’s work draws parallels between Black femme bodies, which are frequently commodified and positioned as sexual assets, and the seductiveness of art objects in the commercial gallery circuit. This exhibition centers on an installation that is envisioned as a composite of a “render farm,” used to process large amounts of graphic data, such as for visual effects for computer games or films, and the rack storage systems used by museums to store paintings when they are not on display.

Cherry has a long-standing interest in technology and how it influences notions of contemporary female identity. Through the structure of a render farm, Caitlin repositions a painting as a graphics card, a piece of hardware responsible for displaying images on a computer monitor. Paintings become storage cards of digital visual information, mirroring their role as coveted analog cultural artifacts in Western society, which, despite that coveted status, often spend most of their lives tucked away in art storage units. By making that storage visible and accessible, the exhibition places the audience within the “back rooms” of a cultural production powerhouse, the kind typically tucked away behind locked doors.

The title Eigengrau means “intrinsic gray” in German and refers to the dark gray color one sees when they shut their eyes, the result of a unique phenomenon of visual noise. For Cherry, this title suggests both a lack of perceptibility and, simultaneously, the extreme ease of access to information and images we experience in the age of social media. An earlier version of this project was exhibited at the artist’s New York City gallery, The Hole, in 2020. This version has been created specifically for the Luck Gallery at the ICA. For each presentation, the sculpture has been adapted to respond to, and in this case reflect, the institutional environment in which it is placed.

Caitlin Cherry is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and was the founder of the online program Dark Study, a contra-institutional space for radical learning about art and theory.

Eigengrau is curated by former ICA Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon.

The exhibition’s presentation at the ICA at VCU
is made possible by generous support from:

Pam Royall

Jay Barrows
Jim Klaus

Philip and Kay Davidson
Anne and Gus Edwards
John and Deborah Kemper
Ashley Kistler
Sharon Larkins-Pederson and Edson Pederson
Margaret Lewis
Celia Rafalko
Caroline and Richard Wright

Cherry’s paintings feature larger-than-life subjects in striking color: Black femme figures, familiar composites drawn from an image culture that thrives on appropriating these women’s likeness while rarely crediting their creativity. Across her recent work, these women’s bodies are overlaid with cryptic alphanumeric symbols—kaleidoscopic incursions that refer back to the codes and algorithms that power our media landscape, fueling the algorithmic tools of Black culture’s dissemination and extraction. They also play at themes of authenticity and authentication, gesturing towards the PIN numbers and digital locks that facilitate the online sale of artificially-editioned art. While the women on view would seem to bare it all, the invocation of cryptography suggests a layer of nuance and agency—a reproach to the traditional female nude figure who passively abides her own sexualization.