John Isiah Walton
Follow the Drinking Grounds
2020

About the Item

Description written by Allison K Young curator/historian - June 2020 About a month ago, an attempt at mass ally-ship went awry on social media. While #BlackLivesMatter activists flooded city streets from Minneapolis to London to protest the police-involved murder of George Floyd, an avalanche of black squares cascaded down Facebook and Instagram news feeds. Intended as a show of solidarity and to amplify BIPOC voices, the “Blackout” ultimately impeded resource-sharing and rendered #BLM posts hyper-visible. This made small work of police surveillance, as their posts came into view within a patchwork grid of dark squares. This incident comes to mind when I consider John Isiah Walton’s Black Paintings, which seem to wrestle with the terms of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, figure, and void. Walton starts by making a black square of his canvas, perhaps an emulation of the “zero-sum” narrative of Modernist abstraction. The paintings are then marked up in layers of acrylic and oil stick, in glaring neon hues, as scenes ranging from the controversial to the intimate or mundane come to populate his canvases. In Follow the Drinking Grounds, 2020, a portrait of Harriet Tubman floats within a field of aqua and green shapes, which are derived from the 16-bit maps of a childhood videogame. Playing as the elf named “Link,” we would navigate a mythical world, seeking to rescue Princess Zelda from a tyrannical demon. In the painting, Tubman gazes at us, intensely, from an aperture at the center of this swamp-like space. Her body is the map, the North Star, rescuer and rescued, all at once. Along the Underground Railroad, invisibility—akin to what Edouard Glissant deceptively called “Opacity”—was the only method of survival. Walton offers clues and annotations across the canvas: the command “Follow,” written in a lower corner of the map, speaks at once to intuition and ancestral knowledge, to surveillance and pursuit, and to the curated digital communities that have become our lifeline these days. The painting’s bottom register is filled with overlapping white shapes. Reminiscent of playing cards or internet pop-ups, they bear symbols denoting Spyware, the Patriot Act, bloodhounds, or Pokemon. In other words: to being followed, surveilled, and chased. For me, this work reflects on the theme of “navigation”—online and offline, in society, in history, or on the streets. In our generation’s quest, is visibility or invisibility the greater asset? The FBI recently tracked a masked arsonist in Philadelphia by following a trail of online cues, from Etsy to Instagram to Poshmark to LinkedIn, before confirming her identity by a forearm tattoo. Visibility, however, remains critical. In Walton’s painting, Tubman’s portrait is surrounded by floating “20”s, a reference to the now-canceled plan to honor the abolitionist hero on the twenty-dollar bill. This is, ironically, the same unit of currency that George Floyd was accused of counterfeiting. The numbers may also just point to 2020, with all we’ve had to navigate, in six long months and counting. Walton told me these symbols reflect multiple realities, multiple paths. That it’s up to each of us to interpret these clues, ourselves. JOHN ISIAH WALTON was born in 1985 in New Orleans, where he currently lives and works as a fine artist. He attended St. Augustine H.S. (1999-2002) and graduated from Sarah T. Reed H.S. (2003). Walton received an AA degree in 2012 from Delgado College, New Orleans. Walton has been a member of Second Story Gallery (2012- 13) and The Front, New Orleans (2014-2017) Level Artist Collective (2015-Present). He has lectured about his work to the graduate program at UNC, Chapel Hill (2014) & his work was donated to the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Creator:

John Isiah Walton (1985, American)

Creation Year:

2020

Dimensions:

Height: 96 in (243.84 cm)Width: 60 in (152.4 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century