Characterised by their vibrant colours, Dominic Chambers' paintings of resting or reading Black figures explore the historical and contemporary absence in the representation of Black leisure and intellectualism.
Read MoreBorn and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Chambers first attended St. Louis Community College before receiving his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (2016) and MFA from the Yale School of Art (2019).
Chambers began his ongoing 'Apple Spirits' series in Milwaukee, which consists of works on paper depicting Black figures at work or rest while spirits with vacant faces hover over them. These early drawings foreshadow recurring motifs in the artist's later work, such as the use of imaginary spaces and portrayals of Black people resting or contemplating.
In Dominic Chambers' paintings, his subjects appear reading, resting, sleeping, or talking amongst themselves. This focus on leisure and meditation stems from his observations that the capitalist American society values constant production over relaxation, while African Americans face contradictory prejudices about their capacity to thrive as intellectuals. Despite their apparent ordinariness, the activities of reading and resting are rarely associated with Black people in the collective imagination, and it is this absence that Chambers seeks to address in his work.
While Chambers' sitters are real people—his friends, many of whom are also artists and intellectuals—the spaces in which they appear are fictional, created by combining vibrant, unrealistic colours, magical realism, and representational figuration. Primary colours dominate the 'Primary Magic' series, in which rays of soft blue shine on reclining figures by water (Tajh by the Waters, 2019) or a faint human figure hovers besides a seated woman, deep in thought, rendered in a palette of yellow (Sunshine Lady, 2020).
Images are not always accessible in Dominic Chambers' work. His series 'Wash Paintings' also depicts scenes of leisure and Black figures, but the artist paints over them with large washes of paint, effectively barring the viewer's direct relationship with the artwork, while alluding to the haziness of spaces that Black bodies occupy.
In the 'After Albers' series, paintings reveal their subjects with relative clarity, although their actions and postures offer limited information about them. The seated woman in After Albers (Kenturah) (2020), for example, appears to be reading, but her face is hidden behind the book or pamphlet that she holds up to her face. Even the colour scheme of the work—deep red in the upper half of the canvas and orange in the other—renders the environment ambiguous as to whether it is inside or outside. 'After Albers' was inspired by the work of Josef Albers, the German-born American artist and educator whose studies of colour emphasised the role of perception in our understanding of colour.
Select solo exhibitions of Dominic Chambers' work include Life is Elsewhere, LUCE Gallery, Turin (2020) and Black, Brief, & Spirited, The Millitzer Studio and Gallery, St. Louis (2017). Lehmann Maupin, which began to represent Chambers in November 2021, is scheduled to present a solo exhibition of his work in February 2022.
Select group exhibitions include Amendments, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2021); Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2021); Black Bodies, White Spaces: Invisibility & Hypervisibility, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2021); Synchronicity, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2020); Black Voices / Black Microcosm, CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm (2020); Interwoven, Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York (2018); and Creative Fusion, MIAD Contemporary Gallery, Milwaukee (2015).
Dominic Chambers' website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
