Johnson created the square faces by painting black soap and wax on the tile planes and then used a blow torch to melt holes for eyes, mouth, and nose. The most theatrical room in the show, it is also the most powerful. The sense of unease culminates in the next room, where the viewer is confronted by three ghoulish mask-like faces leering out of ceramic-tile grids, some of which are smashed. The “Anxious Drawings” that Johnson created in Somerset after Donald Trump’s inauguration hark back to his “Untitled Anxious Audience” series, featuring multitudes of fearful faces daubed in black soap and wax on ceramic tile panels, underscoring a persistent sense of collective disquiet. ©RASHID JOHNSON/KEN ADLARD/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTHĮmploying masks and tropical foliage as leitmotifs, Johnson develops the themes of escape and alienation, all of which might be considered a counterpart to his 2016 show “Fly Away” at Hauser & Wirth in New York, before the U.S. Installation view of “Rashid Johnson Stranger,” 2017, at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, England. At first glance, they look like grids of abstract black patterns on white ground, but then the grids appear to divide into rows of worried faces peering out through hollow eye sockets with crosshatch mouths. From this animated immersive space one moves to a white room hung with four black-and-white oil-on-cotton rag works labeled Untitled Anxious Drawing. The gaping eyes and mouths of the butter sculptures add to the impression of four plant monsters uprooted from the jungle and transposed to the countryside. The large-scale arrangements of palms, yuccas, cactuses, and cheese plants refusing to be contained by the black cage-like frames make an odd juxtaposition with the tidy green fields and farmhouses visible through the windows. Other materials include parachute fabric, neon light tubes, and selected books about “otherness” including Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize-winning The Sellout. Lush tropical plants thrust upward and outward, bursting through the frames, alongside yellow shea-butter sculptures with crude faces gouged into them.
The show begins in a brick-walled former Threshing Barn, where Johnson has positioned four stacks of black steel cube grids that evoke Sol Lewitt. For Johnson, the bucolic English setting accentuates a sense of dislocation. Taking its title from James Baldwin’s 1953 Harper’s magazine essay ”Stranger in the Village” about the author’s experience as an African-American living in an all-white village in Switzerland, Rashid Johnson’s show “Stranger” explores notions of foreignness and the exotic after a two-month residency for the artist at Hauser & Wirth’s farmhouse in rural Somerset, England.
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