Akira Kurosawa Action Figure and Jacob Lawrence Playset
The Akira Kurosawa Action Figure and Jacob Lawrence Playset series extend from a long term engagement with the history of sculpture, its relationship to film and zeitgeist. This project takes up provocations to sculpture made by the artists of Industrial Light and Magic, them in turn, indebted to the work of Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa further, found such purchase as a filmmaker that the title to his opus, Rashomon, is an English idiom encouraging doubt in the face of objective truth known from a sole perspective. How much the hope of Black, and especially Black queer and woman artists to find a way into the popular imagination such that only a round and multi-valent view of Black humanity suffices, even casually.
The action figures are digitally produced, much like the identities of Black youth for the past few decades, later commodified and made to serve anti-Black interests and attitudes. The histories of these interventions are material and can be understood materially. What is more, these material histories cover vast ground. Those geographies can be retraced as well, much like the landmark, and transcendent work of Jacob Lawrence to relay the ineffable of the Great Migration. Let us revisit.
