Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat: SOLO EXHIBITION

At David Nolan’s townhouse space this November, one does not see but smells the art first. A double door opens onto a long, narrow corridor linking two air-tight rooms, one of which exudes a faint but distinct odor—the kind you would expect to find in garages, workshops, or factories. It is the smell of industrial manufacturing—of things being made and synthetically transformed—a strange olfactory mix of newness and debris. I found my way by following the scent until I encountered a futuristic being made entirely out of found tires; its surface is layered, its twisted parts writhing, reaching for me, and expanding toward the ceiling, as if striving to break away from the wall from which it had sprung.

Chakaia Booker’s craft is such that anything she makes must have come from the future. Frank Stella’s “Moby Dick” assemblages, in comparison, look like children’s playthings. To make Empty Seat (2006), Booker salvaged burnt or collapsed tires from around the city, which she then cut, sheared, warped, and riveted onto one another and onto a wooden backing; my verbs by no means exhaust the multitude of techniques involved here. Such demanding processes have become her signature, and, as the gallery’s concise selection of works shows, she has perfected them with astounding focus over the past three decades. The cyborgian creature in its bacchanalian dance and entropic unraveling positions the viewer in a constant push and pull between the desire to look closely—to follow the coiled rubber, to witness its intricate unfolding—and a temporal paralysis in the face of its sheer grandeur, its ceremonial scale. Its six-by-fifteen-by-two cubic-foot volume opens onto an infinite field of forms that is morphing at every angle, almost precipitating what Édouard Glissant has called the “vertigo of unveiling,” in which seeing “unveils something veiled that never becomes purely unveiled but exposes itself in the very mechanism of unveiling.” Faced with these shape-shifting rubber forms and their surface patterns that occasionally flash into view with a quasi-metallic sheen, vision is destabilized as it dissolves into splinters of light that are in fact the myriad reflections of darkness.

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Over her four-decade career, the artist Chakaia Booker has worked with ceramics, textiles and paper. But since the 1980s, she’s been linked to one particularly unconventional medium: rubber tires. A resident of New York’s East Village during that era, Booker found that abandoned tires were plentiful in the neighborhood. “Availability in the early days was an asset, but where I really saw rubber tires’ potential was as a raw material,” she says. “I could really do anything with it, just as I could with wood, steel or clay.” Over the years, Booker’s work with tires has expanded to include large-scale abstract sculptures — one of which is 35 feet tall and currently on view in Manhattan’s garment district — as well as pieces that can be appreciated within the boundaries of a gallery, like those that comprise “Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat,” a New York solo show of Booker’s rubber-tire sculptures created between 1996 and 2021. Whether shredded into graceful ribbons, chopped into jagged spikes or molded to resemble a human torso, each creation reveals the medium’s potential and pliability. “The only limitation with the material is imagination,” Booker says. 

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