Tourmaline
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Chapter NY is pleased to announce Tourmaline’s first solo exhibition, Pleasure Garden, which will take place at Chapter NY’s temporary pop-up location at 126 Madison St. The exhibition features the artist’s recent film, Salacia, and introduces a series of five new photographs inspired by the world of the film.
In Salacia, Tourmaline builds a fictionalized story centered around Mary Jones, a black, trans, sex worker who lived in New York in the 1830s. Set within historical Seneca Village—a free Black land-owning community that was destroyed for the development of Central Park—the film provides a counter-history for a black trans community that has been largely erased from mainstream accounts. The film’s non-linear narrative structure includes a brief interlude presenting found footage of activist Sylvia Rivera, more than a century later, on Manhattan’s west side piers, a former site for displaced queer and trans people. Tourmaline collapses two disparate moments into one to elevate Jones and Rivera’s tethered experiences.
For this exhibition, Tourmaline presents photographs for the first time. While making both these images and Salacia, the artist drew inspiration from Jacob Riis’s photographic practice and Victorian-era pornography. This series of self-portraits are set within an imagined natural outcrop in Seneca Village and influenced by Black-owned pleasure gardens, which unlike the more prevalent white-only pleasure gardens, provided leisurely havens for Black people on the periphery of Lower Manhattan in the 1820s. The pleasure garden of Tourmaline’s creation also extends to outer space; she shows herself in flight, following the Afrofuturist tradition of Black artists envisioning themselves in extraterrestrial realms, representing ultimate liberation from oppressive conditions on Earth. Tourmaline, at the center of each composition, basks in the pleasure of herself. Fashioned in contemporary clothing, but presented through a historical lens, Tourmaline again collapses time, reshaping the past and conjuring the desire for a liberated future.
Tourmaline’s work is an invitation, asking us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible, in order to line up with our desires. Just as the Black community of Seneca Village took an enormous leap to make the impossible possible—believing that they could become free landowners at a time when Black people were enslaved—and as those who facilitated space travel made the impossible possible, Tourmaline demands of her viewers to do the same: to see this moment as an opportunity to tune into the frequency of what is most desired and always possible, and tune out of the well-practiced regurgitation of the false limits imposed all around us.
Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, cultural producer, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. By expanding the legacy of forgotten figures into our present moment and highlighting their minor yet impactful creative acts, she shifts our understanding of broader cultural histories and encourages a reconsideration of the mainstream contemporary narrative.
Tourmaline (b. 1983) lives and works in New York and received her BA from Columbia University. Her work has been presented across the world including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2016, 2019); MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2019); The High Line, New York (2019); The Kitchen, New York (2018); BFI Flare, London (2018); Portland Art Museum, Portland (2018), BAM Cinematek, Brooklyn (2018); The New Museum, New York (2017); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2017). Salacia has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tate.
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Click here for an audio description of Tourmaline’s exhibition.