Exhibition Review: Genevieve Gaignard: Strange Fruit
Genevieve Gaignard: Off With Their Heads: For The Crows To Pluck 2022, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Written by April-Rose Desalegn
Edited by Jana Massoud
With the title Strange Fruit, one might be anticipating an aesthetic of horror. However, upon entering Genevieve Gaignard’s mixed-media exhibition at the Vielmetter Los Angeles, the viewer is met with sumptuous tones of pastels and pinks, a woman posing for her photograph in enormous fluffy gowns, and kitsch fruits - visuals you might expect in an expensive cake shop. With an eye for the subversive, Gaignard creates beauty then forces you to question it - each photograph simulating an icon of American charm then undermining it with reference to a sinister history of racial violence. With allusions to modern-day and historical lynching, Gaignard’s work is provocative, evoking unsettling ruminations on the racism, beauty standards and social hierarchy that are firmly woven into America’s psychological fabric.
Genevieve Gaignard: Off With Their Heads: M'Lady 2022, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Adopted from Billy Holiday’s haunting song of the same name, Strange Fruit highlights that the inextricable nature of America and violence towards its own black citizens must be examined. The work emerges from a time of great historical movements in America and around the world calling for racial justice, citizens acting on peaceful protests, and violent desperations. Paradoxically, Gaignard’s photographs are tantalizing and dream-like, embodying a stunning irony as the artist heavily critiques the American Dream. In Off With Their Heads: The Gallant South (2022), Gaignard embodies Southern-Gothic elements, illuminating the grotesque features of the American-South through a farcical glamorous exterior. In the image, Gaignard herself poses in an antiquated gown before a grandiose yet old and derelict mansion, the white paint fading to brown and pillars crumbling before unkempt plants. The title alludes to the Queen of Hearts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland - a tyrant who would shout the phrase and order the beheading of dissenters, drawing a parallel to the violence of the powerful. This title, in tandem with Gaignard's aristocratic wigs, brings the infamous events of the French Revolution into cognition, during which the bourgeois icon Mary Antionette was beheaded. Here, Gaignard flips the narrative, perhaps suggesting that the time has come for the ruling class of today to face the consequences of their own actions.
Genevieve Gaignard: Off With Their Heads: The Gallant South 2022, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Strange Fruit in Neon (2022) projects the macabre phrase in neon lights upon a colorful background of fruits repeated in columns in pop-art fashion. Gaignard simulates the statement with the sting of satire, displaying the darkest events of American history in luminescent light like an advertisement you might see on the shop front of a bustling city street. The image evokes viewers to take a critical gaze upon their own understanding of the world around them and their perceived realities, asking: Do you only want to see what you believe? Similarly, The Salt of The Earth in Neon (2022) pictures light blue neon lights spelling out its title. Meaning ‘good and honest person’, the phrase holds great cultural ascendancy in America and becomes loaded, even disingenuous, when placed within the backdrop of slavery and white supremacy in the South, both of which influence today’s economic landscape. On a backdrop of pastel flowers, the phrase becomes confrontational - a slice of identity in the American-South hung up in sickeningly sweet tones, inviting scathing critique.
Genevieve Gaignard Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Strange Fruit by Genevieve Gaignard critiques the racialized hatred of America’s past and present through tantalizing, subversive imagery, and will be showing at the Vielmetter Los Angeles between March 19 and May 7.
Photo Editing by Lenin Arache
