Vignettes Of The Frenglish Empire. Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers)

About

Within his artistic practice, Umar Rashid blends fictional and real histories, while freely traversing both time and world geography. Rich with detail, Rashid’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures reference colonialism, empire, and westward expansion in the Americas during the 18th century, remixing global players – African, European, and indigenous peoples – in a process of storytelling and mythmaking. By reworking the historic projects of colonization, war, and the making of nation-states, Rashid creates alternate narratives, scripting a different past for human history – one that intersects with the present and forecasts new futures.

The works in this exhibition span several years of production, and center on the Frenglish Empire, an invented hybrid of the French and British colonial empires, and its points of contact with native and African diasporic cultures across the western hemisphere. With a nod to the literary technique of the frame story, an overarching structure with various narrative vignettes, artworks displayed here include thematic groupings of maps, portrayals of battles, and portraits of characters that all tie into the artist’s broader epic plot. Rashid depicts battalions of freed slaves, militiamen, tribesmen, and African, European and Meso-American nobility, while also incorporating material commodities of the period, such as tea and coffee used to stain his drawing paper. Interweaving research, innovation, and humor, Rashid’s practice oscillates in time, moving between past, present and future, and speaks to the amalgamations of culture that have always existed.