Artist Highlight #3: Rayven D’Clark

Rayven D’Clark. Headshot courtesy of Charlie Lim.

Rayven D'Clark (B. 1995) is a London-based artist and writer. D'Clark's practice explores the notion of black identity between hyper-visibility and invisibility. Through a range of different media and sculptures, D'Clark offers a reimagined ideology of black anatomy. Her art practises merges traditional aesthetic methods of objecthood with everyday experiences.

The Body Politics is a short article by D’Clark, which unravels themes of longings, misinterpretation and vulnerability of the black body. The short essay is constructed through the lens of film, specifically American cinema. Body politics brings forward narratives that are often misheard concerning the black aesthetic. Get Out, a film by Jordan Peele that D’Clark references, perpetuates the complicated conversation of blackness within institutional walls, beyond margins, on the streets, and often hidden beneath us. The politics of blackness revealed in the practices of D'Clark communicate a visual representation of the portrayal of black bodies in film. Her sculptures and photographs of the black body echo bodily gestures found in moving images. These emotions, clothed in fear, anger, confusion portrayed particularly in Get Out, are parallel to D'Clark's works.

At first glance, her sculptures appear as ordinary sculptures seen elsewhere.On the contrary, the politics of the work is the blackface. It is not often that we see the blackface in our magazines, books, let alone as a sculpture. D'Clark fuses earlier ideology of blackness to perhaps contemporary notions of these experiences.

D'Clark's artwork resonates deeply with what is seen today on the streets of Minneapolis, London, France and elsewhere. The artist' s Body Politics is eminent on our television screens. The murder of George Floyd is on our screen, a mirror yet again. A reflective paradox of an unsung song. We 'the blacks'' must confront the 'man in the mirror' once again and continue where we left.'- This existence 'has always been an unstable identity' and seeing the damages it creates from within brings us back to Peele's Get Out. Peele's Visual method along with D'Clark's I Don't See In Colour are both a body of works relevant to having in a conversation.

Rayven D'Clark, I Don’t See Colour, 2018. © D’Clark — Rayven D'Clark, *I Don’t See Colour*, 2018. © D’Clark

Moreover, the artwork titled I Don't See In Colour could be an opening of discussion of Black Body Politics. The title is attested as a simile of 'I Can't Breathe'. Both statements carry a personification of blackness and a demand. A commandment of which the Black Lives Matter movement is not seeking an appraisal from an established institution, Instead it is demanding justice.

In all of this, the emerging artist Rayven D'Clark is amongst many black artists whose work continues to pose questions about black bodies in society. Her body of work is also asking spectators to rethink the narratives of blackness.