COURTESY OF MOBILIA GALLERY
Joyce J. Scott’s “Waterways” can be seen at Bainbridge House in Princeton.
Beads are not as innocuous as they seem. Many of them are made of glass and can chip and fracture if they aren’t handled properly. They encourage cramp-inducing finger motions in those who choose to use them. Drop one on the floor while you’re working, and you may never find it again until you tread on it in the dark.
Attach them to a tether, though, and they begin to have a conversation. Assembling beads usually means getting scores of small objects to work together successfully. A person in a beaded necklace is a participant in that act of optimism.
COURTESY OF MOBILIA GALLERY
“Virgin of Guadalupe,” by Joyce J. Scott.
Some of Joyce J. Scott’s beaded creations are, technically, wearable, even if they might take some ingenuity — and flexibility — to don. The subjects of her pieces are often troubling: gun violence, the sex trade, exploitation, the presence of ghosts and the inevitability of death. But no matter how dark her pieces get, her artistry is way too lively to be downcast. There is terror in her work, but no gloom.
“Declarations,” her solo exhibition at the Bainbridge House in Princeton, comes on with the velocity of folk art. From a distance, her sculptures look like they were assembled in a heady rush of combative delight. There is hardly a straight line or a crisp contour in the entire 20-piece presentation.
Curator Laura M. Giles takes advantage of the brightness and relentless urgency of Scott’s art. Grim as it gets, she wants the show to look fun. She would like to lead you right up to these faces (and there are many faces in “Declarations”) so they might tell their stories.
Once you are in close proximity with Scott’s work, it becomes apparent that there is nothing haphazard about these sculptures. Instead, the artist has meticulously assembled thousands upon thousands of beads to suggest human figures and specific street scenes.
If there is a sinuous, lively quality to the things she is depicting, some of that has been imparted by her medium. Beads are round. They don’t always behave, and they won’t line up politely. They are going to catch the light at different angles and bend our gazes in idiosyncratic ways. A bead master like Scott can make a whole sheet quiver.
COURTESY OF MOBILIA GALLERY
“Yazidi Sex Slaves,” by Joyce J. Scott.
Nothing sits still in “Yazidi Sex Slaves,” an amalgamation in dark pink and silver that hangs on a gallery wall. Though much of this elaborate necklace is roughly flat, a head rises from the middle of the work as if it’s trying to break free from a dimensional prison. There are other faces in the work, too, including one character on the periphery of the necklace who presses his silver fingers against a shape that could be the head of a woman.
Even as they fight, the amalgamation of beads imparts a soft, vulnerable appearance to these figures, and the deliberate crookedness of the lines suggests transience and chaos. Scott doesn’t have to depict coercion and incarceration literally. Everything about this piece feels like a desperate struggle.
“Waterways,” which the artist calls a tapestry in beads, isn’t quite so menacing, but it is just as tempestuous. Scott pulls together flat patches made in the shape of human figures, tethers them together and rolls it all out in the shape of a blue-green heart. The many individuals who populate this shiny collective include several water spirits with human torsos and serpentine legs that coil beneath them. A few look like genies sprung free from their lamps. Conical shapes and open mouths fill the spaces between bodies that interact at alarming angles. The limbs of some figures are bent in ways that no real-world joint can accommodate. A few are mere whispers in the beading: thin, silver-flash outlines tucked into the maelstrom. At least one man appears to be breaking into cubes.
These are people to wonder and worry about as they shimmy through Scott’s rambunctious scenes. But even if her work was nonrepresentational, the sheer number of lines and curves generated by the accretion of beads guarantees that there is always something new to notice. Sculptures like “Mz. Teapot” are loaded with detail: doll-like bead-characters atop other characters; symbols sewn into the bead-dress of the main figure; little beads for her headdress; thick, weighty beads in a segmented tube to represent her frond-like braids. No matter where you stand, it always seems like this carousel is turning your way.
The dynamism of “Declarations” is augmented by the artist’s technique. Scott favors the peyote stitch — an ageless beading practice that is often associated with indigenous Americans but found all over the world. (A portrait of the rappers Biggie, Faith Evans and Lil’ Kim in the flat style of hieroglyphic art is, among other things, a visual joke about beaded artifacts by ancient Egyptians.) Peyote stitching can appear loose, but beaded pieces made by this method are extremely durable. A committed peyote stitcher can surround an object with beads in no time, and build layers of beads atop the bead she has already laid down, or get rid of the source object entirely and present beads, locked in place by thread, in great heaps and mounds.
COURTESY OF GOYA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY/GOYA-GIRL PRESS
“Untitled Fairy Tale,” by Joyce J. Scott
No matter how rigid these peyote-stitched pieces appear, they are still more malleable than they would be were they sculpted from marble or made of clay and fired in a kiln. Scott’s pieces aren’t action figures, but they do give the impression that they could be manipulated and altered without breaking them or messing with their meaning. Everything and everybody depicted in “Declarations” seems to be on the move: the accusatory characters pointing at a downcast, embarrassed face in “Caught Peeping,” the despondent, shorts-wearing skeletons surrounding the “Virgin of Guadelupe,” the alternately austere and cartoonish faces that sprout from a green bush in the “Untitled Fairy Tale.”
Even a rendition of “Le Monde,” the final plate in the Tarot’s Major Arcana, casts its worldly protagonist into a tangle of beaded strands that look as if they could sway like a spider web in the wind.
All of these characters feel like they are in trouble. (That includes the spirit on the Tarot card.) The world of Scott’s pieces is sharp and filled with pointy objects and odd salients. Many of her subjects face this serrated landscape naked. An undercurrent of fear about the permeability of the human body runs through “Declarations,” which figures, since beads must be penetrated in order to be strung together.
Combat is on the artist’s mind: in “Excessive Force,” she wraps 13 cylindrical objects, each roughly the shape of a bullet, with beads, and marks each with the initials of victims of state violence. “Harriet’s Rifle 2,” a gun made of glass and decorated with beads and thread, greets visitors at the door of Bainbridge House. It is a weapon crafted for the steward of the Underground Railroad, and it is coldly beautiful, but it is one good shock away from shattering.
But really, what fun would an unbreakable world be? If Scott truly longed for permanence, she would probably have picked a different medium. Even her “Ancestry/Progeny” is depicted in glass and porcelain.
There is a sense of exhilaration to “Declarations” that transcends social justice concerns and pushes the show toward the realm of pure adventure. There are at least three guns stitched into “Blutz” — the busiest, Bosch-iest and most brilliant of the many exciting bead tapestry pieces. Flames erupt from the heads of falling bodies; in the foreground of a piece that is alive with vivid color, a woman in black and white buries her head in her hands. There are fingers, faces in profile, flowing locks, limbs unconnected to any visible torso, and a glowering skull presiding over the entire hectic scene.
The imagery is grounded in the urban past and the long and vexed history of race relations in The United States. The wounds she is showing us, however, are all fresh.
The Princeton University Art Museum will present “Joyce J. Scott: Declarations” at Bainbridge House through Jan. 10; visit artmuseum.princeton.edu/exhibitions-events.
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