Timothy Yanick Hunter in The New Inquiry

May 10, 2022

Pacing Ourselves: Timothy Yanick Hunter and Katherine McKittrick in Conversation

By Katherine McKittrick

In December 2021, Cooper Cole exhibited Timothy Yanick Hunter’s solo exhibition, Volcanic Spine. The exhibit, set in a stark white room, has four pieces: “Untitled (Loop 1),” “Untitled (Loop 2),” “No More Accidents,” and “Pelée’s Tower.” Each composition is an expression of different archival moments from black history: traffic accident rates, repeated photographs of a volcanic eruption, home movies, the book Born to Slow Horses by poet Kamau Brathwaite, cricket, the Caribbean market, Jamaica’s People’s National Party.

The materials, visual cues and invocations vary. Volcanic images are presented on voile fabric print and are placed overhead, draped across the ceiling. Repeated photographs of Jamaican Deputy Prime Minister Seymour Mullings, also on voile fabric print, stretch from the ceiling and onto the floor. Televisions are encased in metal, cement board, wood. The videos—single-channel, two-channel—are looped and accompanied by mashed-up soundtracks composed of voices, ambient undertones, jazz samples, light soul beats.

Volcanic Spine offers fragmented histories, sounds and textures, all of which collapse into expressions of diasporic curiosity: visual and textual prompts that momentarily signal, but do not totally reveal, shards of global black histories. In placing different worlds together—fabric and screens and song and earth ruptures and Brathwaite and Ghanaian brigadier William Akuffo—Hunter visually offers a series of uneasy contradictions. How do we think screens and fabric together? How do we connect the ocean to gridlock? How are these soundtracks fusing different times and spaces? What happened after the volcanic rupture, after the traffic accident? The contradictions and questions are not resolved. Instead, unknowingness and vulnerability hover.

Hunter manipulates time and space by slowing down and speeding up and layering multi-textures; what is not supposed to be there (here)—black aesthetics—emerges momentarily, gets tethered to elsewhere, and is made into a different kind of facsimile. Using visual and sonic loops and looping techniques throughout the installation, he gestures to and builds on the work of black artists who manipulate, splice, and reinvent existing sound samples and tracks to reconfigure music.

The practice of looping also relies on repetition and return; the art of looping is a studied, measured and persistent intervention into colonial time-space, filled up with collaged and collated texts and sounds. The intervention is a creative act that speaks to the praxis that underlies Volcanic Spine. Hunter describes his art as inextricably tied to research; inquiry punctuates the creative practice and text. Or, research (reading, studying, writing, questioning, searching, experimenting) is art. With this, the constraints of race thinking are unsettled, callous racial-sexual categories and positivist grammars are named and abandoned, and a black creative worlds contradict, spiral and unfurl.

In February 2022 I interviewed Timothy Yanick Hunter about Volcanic Spine. We talked about origins and found objects and screens and J Dilla and studying-as-art-practice and note taking and chopping and loops. I learned about pace and invention and repetitive interruptions and curiosity as vulnerability.

TO VIEW THE INTERVIEW VISIT THE NEW INQUIRY

For more information about Timothy Yanick Hunter please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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