Tipping Point

Working in acrylic and mixed media on canvas, as well as graphite and ink on paper, Leyla Faye’s art often refers to her ethnic background (with a “hyphenated identity”) and upbringing. Her large canvases, sometimes incorporating three-dimensional extensions (thus linking them to an American Pop art tradition where Robert Rauschenberg’s [1925 – 2008] celebrated Combines, works that combine aspects of painting and sculpture, is close at hand as a comparison), made a huge impact at the Frieze New York Art Fair in 2024. Reviewing the fair (in ‘Frieze Fun! All over Chelsea!’, article in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 7 May 2024) Jan Garden Castro writes:

Curiously, there were many works by women focusing on universal women’s issues. In addition, work was selling out. On preview Day One at Frieze, Leyla Faye’s large mixed media doppelgangers or double identities of herself at Company Gallery were sold out. Each work shows one or two women in rooms in a doll house. The identities are not fixed and suggest her white and black heritage. The compositions are mixed media and feature odd poses in small spaces.

Faye’s successful participation at Frieze was preceded by an, equally well received, solo exhibition (Trust Fall, 3 February – 11 March 2023) at Company Gallery, New York. Arianna Nourse (independent cultural producer, writer and curator) wrote the following in connection with the exhibition, where “doll-like, look-alike figures” were “rendered with an artisan’s delicacy” (in works like Tipping Point):

If you were a kid and that kid you were had a doll, then maybe you already know about doll parts. You already know about dressing and undressing an easily manipulated facsimile. You know of plastic and cloth, of titillation and tenderness.

The doll-like, look-alike figures in Leyla Faye’s Trust Fall are rendered with an artisan’s delicacy. While they may look similar, each is unique - hand-painted, one of one then carefully dressed in papier-mâché uniform.

Throughout the exhibition’s canvases, the artist’s characters gaze down, out, up, sideways. A trust fall - the act of falling backwards blindly into another’s waiting arms - a leap of faith, a risk that another will catch us. Here, the risk taking is at a primary level self-contained: in Ascender’s Peek, each woman supports the other; they rise in pyramid form together and will stick the landing or fall together. In the composition, an uncannily circular sun and purple sky create an impossible space; the Annette Kellerman swimsuits and caps suggest an impossible time. A time when people who looked like our dolls were not welcome to form cheer pyramids along America’s shorelines.

As an artist at Yale and since, Faye’s work examined the anxieties at the centre of the Venn Diagram circles of Black and White. While using her likeness, she spoke allegorically about the collision of races within and without. Nightmare scapes in which a Black woman’s genitals and legs are replaced by a White body. An infantilised Leyla reduced to tears, manhandled and shamed in a supermarket aisle. In Trust Fall, Faye’s characters are now robust. Muscular, sporty, they traverse trapeze and tightrope with the solidity and solidarity of a seasoned professional. A glance at their trapped, unsure expressions, though, remind the viewer how much is at stake when we perform.

Faye describes each individual figure as less self-portrait than separate doppelgänger, each holding her own experience. If we were to regress, and wonder, and peel off a layer, we’d find a body painted underneath, parts intact. No need for this though, for Faye has already stripped her dolls bare. Focus, anticipation, uncertainty, resignation: everything she feels, they feel. Everything they feel, through her nuanced realism, we feel, too. An emotional transmission from artist to viewer. This, too, an act of trust.

Provenance
Company Gallery, New York, Trust Fall, 3 February – 11 March 2023.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired through the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation