In Dominic Chambers' paintings, his subjects appear reading, resting, sleeping, or talking amongst themselves.
Read MoreThis 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.
