Fictions More Precious by Rodell Warner at Big Medium, Austin
By Natalie Willis Whylly
April 01, 2024
“Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried.”
– Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001)
Invoking feelings of yearning, compassion, and tenderness, Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner’s Fictions More Precious, curated by Coka Treviño, at Big Medium in Austin, TX, also brings up spirits, specters, and wonder. Part of his work presented as the 2023 Tito’s Prize recipient, the exhibition builds on Warner’s digital excavations, experimentations, and conjurations around the problematics of the colonial archive in the Caribbean. With apparitions floating in mid-air, and conceptualized ghosts in the proverbial AI machine—this offering of images of ancestors passed and imagined at Big Medium feels apt in title, location, and intention.
The site, a former warehouse in an industrial area—a setting of surplus, with images of laborers—becomes a virtual seance of sorts, aided in part by Warner’s audio. Heady meditative reverberations of the artist’s making resound throughout the space, grounding the body more fully in the viewing experience and adding to the sense of encounter with the images. Wires are exposed on projectors, and the warm aura of innocuous, domestic lamps illuminate aluminum photographic prints for observation. There is a sincerity and gentle poeticism in the intentional curatorial choice of having the proverbial guts and mechanisms of artistic display made visible. It signals a vulnerability and openness, and it feels unpretentious, fallible, and most importantly, curious. This is an exhibition categorically in one sense, yes, but for those willing to enter and perhaps imagine their own loving fictions as viewers, it is also a communal altar to the varied, full lives of ancestors that will largely remain untold and uncelebrated due to the historic intentional erasure of documents from archives from the Region [1].
