It’s one of New York’s hottest days yet when I connect with multi-disciplinary artist and photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis via Zoom. Sidewalks sizzle. Sweat pools under my thighs. Shaniqwa, however, looks unbothered, her face smiling and horizontal as she props up her phone on her car dashboard. She’s chatting with me while driving through Los Angeles, where she lives, sunglasses on, wearing a bright purple-pink dress that I assume reflects excitement for her latest exhibition, Everywhere You Go, There You Are, now showing at CONTROL Gallery in Los Angeles through August 26th.
Soon after she begins speaking, Shaniqwa (responsibly) goes camera-off so as not to risk crashing. With our screens blank, what’s left of her is the classic white-on-black Zoom text that reads “Sheeks iPhone,” followed by a red heart emoji next to it. Even beautiful, world-renowned artists employ emojis and have nicknames. As a photographer best known for her intimate, sensitive portraiture featuring ubiquitous cultural figures (like former President Barack Obama, Serena Williams and Spike Lee), the absence of our faces feels strange, though it’s fitting given the context of Shaniqwa’s new show.
Everywhere You Go, There You Are captures the emotional beauty of objects in their natural state. The show features everything from unassuming local flora to car dashboard close-ups, all of which Shaniqwa encountered while walking through her California neighborhood. “I am making images that people may not want to see from me,” Shaniqwa says, referring to how distinct this is from her other work. “Oftentimes, I feel like people just want to see my photos of beautiful humans in beautiful light. But I’m most excited to show this other side,” she explains.
The collection, with its intentional lack of faces, includes close-ups of bursting orange and yellow wildflowers tucked between chain link fences, tall evergreen trees reflected onto black and white puddles, and upside-down impressions of mountainous houses undulating on the gentle chlorine ripples of swimming pools just after closing time. These Los Angeles alcoves provided total immersion and refuge for Shaniqwa, a space where she could fully let her “brain breathe” after years of taxing commercial projects. “I wanted to tap back in with myself,” she says.
And while, yes, there is limited human presence in these works, it would be obtuse to assume that the photo subjects are not alive. “All of the things I photographed are extensions of the self,” she says. “It’s all how I feel and see things on a given day. It’s how I connect with the way light is hitting a blade of grass.” In a sense, Shaniqwa developed a closeness to objects like she would with any human subject.
Among other things, the exhibit invites you to rediscover the novelty and nostalgia of what Shaniqwa calls life’s “banal moments.” In other words, to look closely at that which is in our immediate vicinity as if we’re seeing it for the first time, instead of assuming we already know its private corners. While these images are a return to child-like wonder in the abstract, they’re also familiar to her in that they’re a literal call back to photos she took as a child in her bedroom.
“When I was looking at what I’d shot [in Los Angeles], I realized that a lot of the things I photographed come from these original photographs I took in my bedroom when I was 10 or 11 of stuffed animals, photos hung on my wall or photo booth selfies,” she says. Shaniqwa explains that, to her, this illustrates her belief that “time runs in a loop.” Quoting Mid-20th Century American photographer and painter Saul Lieter, she says, “‘We as artists are doomed to make the same work over and over again,’” explaining that she created the works in Everywhere You Go, There You Are because, in a way, she already captured the images years ago.
She honors her younger self throughout the show by including those very childhood photographs in the form of zine handouts and Basquiat-inspired framing techniques, adorning the wooden perimeters of her new work with smaller frames containing the images from her youth. Shaniqwa also includes select textile paintings, which she started creating only recently — a decision that was “freeing.” The textile paintings “reminded me that I don’t have to stick to this one label of being a photographer. I can branch out and expand to wherever my mind is taking me. Even to past lives,” she says.
The glossy, dreamscape-inspired show is an unforgettable reminder that “beauty is everywhere,” the photographer says. Looking at the images, you’ll fight the urge to physically step inside and fully enter Shaniqwa’s iridescent vision of the world.
At the very least, Shaniqwa hopes the work invites you to look closer, and “feel whatever you want to feel” about your environment, even if your window view, like mine, is sticky popsicle debris oozing onto hot asphalt, or warm trash heaps radiating in the relentless summer sun.
Everywhere You Go There You Are is on view at Control Gallery through August 26, 2023.
Credits
Images courtesy of the artist and Control Gallery.