COMMON STRANGERS
Stacia Washington
/Jean-Michel Basquiat
ART & HISTORY
Introduction
We accept when a method actor admits that a role carried away the most integral parts of them, altering their means of existence long after the camera stops rolling, a point where the performer’s intent runs completely away from them. To step into Stacia’s studio is to witness an artist working to tread against the heavy slipstream of that exact momentum. The summer’s canvases are stacked against three of the four studio walls, telling a story of an intense, borderline physical occupation, illustrating a creative evolution that was initially defined by explicit distance.
At first, the connection was impossible. The impact of one whose shadow looms impossibly large over the contemporary art world was simply bypassed during an unconscious dialogue. But the gravitational pull, the compelling draw toward a late master of the neo-expressionist calling, became impossible to resist. It started as a surrender: a means of expelling personal woes and ideas onto the canvas where they could be beautifully contained rather than held internally. The sessions were established in working through instinct and emotion, an initially therapeutic process that quickly accelerated into a dialogue over stretched cotton and hues. He dictated forms, altered palettes, and found his place in almost every piece. Expressionism was supposed to be a remedy, but Pallett soon found herself pressured by the instability of an internal whim.
“I didn’t like his work. I thought it was overrated,” Stacia admits bluntly. “I was tired of hearing his name. In a random interest to see what the big deal was, I opened one of his books, and now I can’t close it.”
“I didn’t work in expressionism. I was still attached to the literal means of creation: portraiture, anatomical renderings infused with poetic understanding. Pulse was the pinnacle of my creative development in that season. Then, I was given an invitation.
THE CALL
Entering a room darkened by living shadows, the artist encounters a figure of duality: fame possessed, and fame as it had overcome. The one who currently lives kneels before the lifeless form of yesterday’s success. It is understood that the one who lives draws and channels a pseudo-identity from what remains.
A darkened pool of crimson lies under the head of the former revere, the container of ideas and purpose only understood by who once was, cut right through in a final blow. The success of today stands with hands stained with guilt, but more than that: did he now possess the power he sought?
The artist was stricken. The plea to save, to preserve, was offered and rejected. The only matter and purpose left took the form of an offer, the tides of fate at her feet:
“DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?”
The words hung heavy and unclean in a room tainted with death. The prospect of sacrifice, the price for these self-focused desires, lay plain and bloody in front of her. It was clear, and it was impossible. The notion, the opportunity, the burden rejected. All at once, the illusion of the moral struggle dissolved into nothing. A question, its answer, and the continued freedom of the artist’s spirit.
The first recognition of an overlap in creative views came with a repeated confrontation to an alignment of ideas. The art industry has not changed in terms of pretentious sorts tilling the landscape for artists over the stretch of the 40-year span between Washington and Basquiat. As a response, both artists invented concise slogans communicating their perspectives. SAMO, as in “same old bullshit” is strictly associated with Jean-Michel, while REFE ("room enough for everyone") is Stacia’s response, a slogan providing more space and an outlet against the non-inclusive nature of an art industry that is even more restricted and elitist than it was in the past.
The pieces inspired by his style are reflections, visual invocations of what was being imparted onto her over time. The depiction of the dream, the sense of acceptance in drawing these to begin with, before it was a question, now it was a tangible reality. The realization that someone else, especially this someone whom she resisted, created work that would be described just the same as her own was sobering.
ACCEPTANCE
The way I see it, this piece was my way of paying respects. It was painted on instinct, but I later came to accept that the skull along with the banana were representations for Andy Warhol. The entirety of the painting was a testament to the dreamscape and gritty reality that New York is for anyone who dares to make a wish to Lady Liberty. It was the catalyst in a season of high-pressure production. Seven pieces in one and a half weeks quickly grew to over twenty by the end of August.”
INSPIRED WORK
By October, the room was completely crowded by large canvases, the output of such a high-burning creative velocity that it left Stacia exhausted. She transitioned to canvas fabric, salvaged scraps procured cheaply but transformed into gallery-ready works. Now They Pay Us to Run was the most intimately influenced; the means of channeling his style and instincts onto the composition was stark and noticeable. The communion between this influence and her work had progressed from passive inspiration to overt dictation over the entire process.
Stacia could tell that she was no longer painting alone. Something had definitely shifted by the time Crossroads was created. It exists as the final piece created at the peak of the transmission loop before she retreated behind the boundaries of burnout. It’s almost poetic that a piece about standing in the in-between would be exactly where she decided to stop.
The piece is large and delicate in spite of the violently painted images of iconography, stretching from an homage to The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's drum album cover to the mainstay depiction of the fallen influence itself in the top left corner. It is a confrontation between the viewer and their memories of the past, where Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and the spiritual path of Robert Johnson’s route exist to ask the viewer where their limitations are, and what their direction will be.
“I worked until 4:12 in the morning, bringing the piece forward, and as I worked I felt the push,” Pallett recalls. “I felt the weight of the mantle I had been interested in receiving coming down on me, and I knew I needed to step away.”
.She now stands in between, at a necessary pause where the lines of individual identity had started to blur. After repeated testing of personal boundaries, the gravity of the past is finally being told to stay in the background.
The Interview