In their debut solo exhibition in New York, interdisciplinary artist Allen-Golder Carpenter challenges America’s mass consumption of Black culture. Taking its title from a Cities Aviv track of the same name, To Dream of Smoke deals in the aesthetics and objects found within Hip Hop, pop culture and the prison industrial complex.
In their expansive exploration of Black experiences, the Washington D.C. based artist creates sculptural works sourced from the mundane: electric scales, ski masks, Instagram posts, inmate property bags, Domino sugar, screenshots of The Boondocks. The ambitious project includes a sound installation made in collaboration with multi-talented Playboi Carti affiliate Blackhaine and the To Dream of Smoke / 100 Rappers book, a visual study of contemporary rap.
The exhibition is on display at No Gallery in the Lower East Side until April 7th, 2024.
With To Dream of Smoke, Allen merges his art practice and love of rap music. He explains the influence of rap on his work, “I love rap music because it’s so thick with lingo and many times very regionally specific terminology and accents that I wonder how much someone outside of this music culturally understands when listening?” This question of understanding and viewership is at the center of Allen’s exhibition, the latest entry in Allen’s “Body Surrogate” series which presents and reimagines representational depictions of Black masculinity. His pieces have been exhibited in spaces around the world including Screw Gallery, Galerie Kandlhofer, Von Ammon Co. and Icebox Project Space.
Allen uses late 2010’s viral rapper Tay K as an entry point to force viewers to confront our complicity in systems that force Black boys into survival tactics. In The Race, he juxtaposes Tay K’s first photo posted from jail with the platinum certification for his song “The Race” aligning them with a shattered hand mirror. The piece shows the disconnect between the commercial success of Tay K’s brief rap career and the broken systems currently shaping his life. He asks us to reconsider the media portrayals of Tay K, “How much can we judge the actions of a child fighting for survival, what if instead of just punishing him, we punished the society that failed him?”
In The Race 2, Allen takes inspiration from Gil Scott Heron’s “Pieces of a Man” and recreates the photo of Tay K through an assemblage of inmate property inventory bags. In addition, the bags contain a shredded shirt and shattered glass. Using this construction, he visualizes the dehumanization and humiliation that occurs within the United States’ prison system.
In Untitled (self portrait), Allen pairs a portrait of Maryland rapper Q Da Fool with a ski mask stretched over a bag of powdered sugar. He tells me about the encounter that inspired the piece, “I used to wear ski masks to try and look tough or unapproachable. One time, someone came right up to me and felt at ease talking to me because of my soft, even sweet eyes”. Through this interrogation of Black masculinity and its performance, Allen questions the desire to appear intimidating in the first place.
In I Choose Violence, Allen draws attention to the mental health crises within the Black community particularly impacting Black men. The piece which consists of photographs and scales is named after the song “I Choose Violence” by Atlanta rapper Glokk40spaz, Allen was inspired by a line in the song where Glokk40spaz alludes to self harm. Allen was taken aback by this break in armor and related through his own struggles around body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. These experiences are aligned in the piece through the grouping of a bathroom scale and digital scale for weighing drugs.
Catch To Dream of Smoke at No Gallery before it goes.