Exhibitions

LESTER MERRIWEATHER: ANA•LOG

Crosstown Arts / 1350 Concourse Ave. September 27, 2024 - January 19, 2025

Lester Merriweather

ANA•LOG: Fourteen Pics is a cumulative project referencing elements from several continuing bodies of work by Lester Julian Merriweather including #JETBlack, WHITE(S) ONLY, Vanilla Extract, #WGW, COLOR(ED) THEORY and Merriweather’s most recent collage series, #BetterGardensAndJungles.

The works presented draw upon several sources: They take direct visual inspiration from the compositions of the 1982-88 Basquiat-Warhol Collaborations. ANA•LOG’s methodology invokes the long-rumored Dr. Dre concept album The Planets in which the famed producer executed each individual track of the album in a completely different genre, thus creating an intensely lush atmospheric soundscape that still would exist as parts of a whole. The gestural treatment of the layered and excavated surfaces pay homage to the experimental processes of the mid-60s Developer tool works by the late Jack Whitten as well as the innovative organic Tesserae paintings that Whitten continued creating until his death in 2018.

Language is key to the works included in ANA•LOG. In breaking down its linguistic aspects, Merriweather examined varied forms of the word Analog. The word is defined as “not computerized”; Analog is a counter-cultural delineation that separates itself from the “Digital”. The individually collaged-by-hand “units” in ANA•LOG function in a fashion similar to the amalgamation of pixels in the Digital space. One could recognize Analogous, “a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect” within the approach of Merriweather’s collage practice. In terms of Memphis slang, “Ana” is a shortened form of “Animosity”. “Log” in this instance serves as a “Recorded History”. ANA•LOG essentially serves as a “Record of Angers Remembered ” obtained through repeated racial disparities which are then immortalized within generalized/homogeneous American visual media. Merriweather examines the concept of agency over Black Visualization within American Popular Culture.