David-Jeremiah

You cannot get close to the work without becoming a part of it—or, shall we say, complicit in it. “G'ordiavonte Fold,” David-Jeremiah’s debut installation and exhibition at Anonymous Gallery, consists of a large-scale American flag, spanning nearly the entirety of the floor, surrounded by a powdered mixture of chalk, crushed pig skull, and dry ramen. The flag is double-sided: the side that faces up is handmade with the lustrous black fabric of real and fake Lamborghini floor mats, while the hidden underside is a readymade tricolor flag.

Getting close to the flag necessitates tracking the white powder onto its surface—after a single day, white footprints crisscrossed the surface of the flag, encoding the act of obfuscation into the work itself, with individual shoe-prints visible like fingerprints in a crime scene. In a ritualistic folding of the flag, which will take place over the course of the exhibition, the black side is progressively covered until rendered invisible. The Black American subject, the artist suggests, is made central to, before being ultimately subsumed by, a white American contemporary art discourse.