Antonio McAfee "Crackling 1" (2021). Archival photographic print, 3D image with glasses 20 x 16 in. Framed.
Antonio McAfee "Crackling 1" (2021). Archival photographic print, 3D image with glasses 20 x 16 in. Framed.
Operating with photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and collage, Antonio McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation. Through appropriating and manipulating historical portraits, he engages in prescribed views of individuals and reworks images to provide an alternate, more layered image and concept of the people depicted. His photographs oscillate between formal considerations (modifying the print’s surface) and imaginary potential (establishing new backstories and roles) of the photographed sitter.
Throughout all McAfee’s work, the primary concern is to depict visual and physical transformation, in which the superficial read of him and others are abstracted to render it unstable. This is an attempt to encourage a layered and tangled relationship with whom and what is visually offered. One way he addresses prescribed assumptions is to use historical narratives and portraits. Through using appropriating sources, there is a basis for understanding particular ideas and stories that are passed down and sustained.
The main source of the artist’s portraits are family members that transitioned, funk icons, and studio portraits of middle-class African Americans from The Exhibition of American Negroes organized by W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas Calloway, and Historic Black Colleges for the 1900 Paris International Exposition. The exhibition was a photographic, economic, and legislative survey of middle-class blacks in Georgia. Discussing her strong feelings for a photographic portrait of a Native American family, Lucy Lippard presents the phrase ‘intersubjective time’. Despite all the differences between the family, photographer, and her - time (a century), ethnicity, gender, class, etc. - she was able to develop a personal connection to the family that was rooted in how they were depicted. This urged her to conduct further research, which informed her of the specifics of their lives. Similarly, Antonio creates work that rests in the past, gets filtered through his experiences and artistic practice, and is shared to an audience to offer something anew. - Antonio McAfee ‘22