Exhibitions: Dianna Settles

Dianna Settles: Olly Olly Oxen Free
June 17 - July 31, 2021
Lexington, KY

In a self-portrait set inside a jjimjilbang (찜질방, Korean spa and bathhouse) called Jeju Sauna, Dianna Settles sits perched atop an urn-shaped stool with a towel draped over her head. Prickling swirls of hot sauna steam envelop her body and meld with the variegated patterns of jade tiles surrounding her. Elsewhere, a group of people in a dry sauna rest sprawled across the floor in their loose orange spa uniforms, while another painting depicts the artist and other bathers sitting by a public bath as two Korean women scrub the bodies of patrons using exfoliating mitts.

Alongside these tranquil scenes from the jjimjilbang, Dianna Settles’s paintings draw from memories of Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice with friends, protests, and time spent in jail. These works, in her words, are linked in their reflections on communal joy, autonomy, and shared power, and also provide a glimpse into the institutions that are threatened by this collective power and threaten to take it away.

Superficially paralleling the Jeju Sauna experience, admission into jail also involves a stripping of one’s clothes in exchange for an orange uniform. Yet jails and prisons isolate and punish individuals, while the spa promotes communal gathering and self-care. Vulnerability in these spaces shifts in the body’s freedom or confinement. The shyness in nakedness at a public bath melts away in time but in jail, people are always made vulnerable through surveillance and the inherently violent and dehumanizing carceral system.

Rethinking and rebuilding a world without prisons and police always begs the question, “what will replace them?”* When no longer relying on police, individuals can take matters into their own hands by learning self-defense skills to protect themselves and each other. Settles and friends enact this form of community care together in their jiu-jitsu practice, seen in large-scale paintings that capture the expansive feeling of joy in collective movement. And while people are present in all other paintings, a solitary exception is a small painting of an Atlanta cop car set ablaze. When envisioning what cop-free communities might look like, this work captures the energy and raw potential that can take us there.

Beginning as written inventories, Settles’s compositions gather experiences and memories in a collective history of people and objects. Stylizing rich environments where the figures of her friends and community members are rendered with the utmost care, her detailed handiwork reveals meticulously drawn tattoos, book titles,** the design of a Chinese wan shou wu jiang (萬壽無疆, boundless longevity) mug, and Atlanta protest fliers. Objects, while rooted to their material existence, serve as symbols of people, places, and historical events, and even the paintings themselves are deeply connected to the artist and her friends with collaboratively made wood panels and homemade gesso. All elements are imbued with meaning that speaks to their greater interconnectedness.

It is this emphasis on communal bonds that bring to mind Angela Y. Davis’s words, “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.” In these wellsprings, hope bubbles forth from collective struggle, rest, care, and strength to build alternative futures and worlds. Settles provides a brilliant insight into what this work can look like and what genuine community is — not as an aesthetic gesture or utopian ideal — but as lived experience.

For those who have been isolated from communal experiences, whose relationship to the present moment has been distanced through performance or discourse, take these works as evidence that there is belonging to be found, to oneself and to others, through active solidarity within the greater movement.

— Jooyoung Park (Emma Friedman-Buchanan)


* Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
** George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972); Marcello Tarì, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (2021); Fumiko Kaneko, The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman (1991); Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009).

Press:
Together in Peace and Protest, by Natalie Weis, Hyperallergic, July 30, 2021

Review: Olly Olly Oxen Free, by Megan Bickel, Ruckus Journal, July 22, 2021