In the Glistening Waters: Khari Turner's Solo Exhibition

Wisconsin enjoys 400 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, and as one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water, those miles have sustained life for thousands of years. These bodies of water have been used for economic growth and prosperity in many ways, but the rivers and lakes and waterways that connect to Lake Michigan to the city are also political, eventually used as a natural divide to reinforce inequality in a newly industrialized city, or diverted to waste treatment plants built in the segregated areas of a post-Civil War north. But the Great Lakes history is relatively tame compared to other aquatic waterways. In that respect, perhaps no water is as politically and historically fraught as the ocean routes between the United States and West Africa and the banks upon which slave ships landed. Waters from these banks, as well as the Great Lakes, are just some of the waters part of Khari Turner’s library. The Milwaukee-born artist has returned to his hometown with a solo exhibition at Portrait Society that uses those liquids as tools to pursue themes around growth, class, and abundance.

Turner grew up in on the north side of Milwaukee with his grandparents, in the neighborhoods that have been (and remain) most impacted by redlining. One luxurious feature that distinguished this home was the belowground pool in their backyard. This pool, in the summertime, served as a communal space for kids and neighbors in the area—an oasis in a land that is not exactly landlocked. In the deeply segregated north side of the city, Turner’s childhood summers became a time to transform and connect, not just to merely survive. Eventually all the pumping and scrubbing and chem treating becomes tough to justify as the kiddos age. So: fill the pool with dirt and reap other benefits from the space—like squash and okra and huge, juicy greens. This is what his grandparents decided, and enlisted their strongest grandson to help with the harvest. It is from this transition in personal history that Turner draws his solo exhibition at Portrait Society.

In Performed with the Bloom of Cabbage, a figure in a buttermilk dress reclines among the succulent leaves, as if she and her entirely vegetal supporting cast pose in their choreographed collapse. One arm is thrown behind her head, dangling green-tipped manicure over the cabbage plumes. Her direct yet aloof expression has been dripped away, marbling her face with charcoal and water from the aforementioned worldly collection. This is Turner’s signature move: a patent-pending mix of painterly materials that disrupts the image with eddies swirling through deep black sediment. If you are unaccustomed to considering fluid dynamics in the contemporary art gallery, you may look at these sections as aerial maps of drowning lands. Or perhaps as garden dirt beneath a faucet as it washes off your hands.

All artist needs balance. Joy sparks amid the vegetables and sunflowers, rendered pillowy and ripe enough for the pages of Fine Gardening. These velvet textures butt up, confused, against rigid stained glass, liquified charcoal, and acrylic. It feels busy at times, more so when you read the artist statement and context for each material. But even when Turner’s paintings seem overwrought with personal history, particularly when he relies on mixing media for the profundity of their contexts rather than their visual cohesion, an honest artistic vision prevails. Which is to say that Turner’s ideas and methods have both a strong foundation and personal conviction—plenty of material to refine into real, meaty stuff.

One painting emerged as a clear standout in the solo exhibition. A Space Between Sky and The Ocean blends painting, tiling, stained glass and Turner’s water and charcoal method to portray a young man swimming through a pool. Visually, the glass behaves like water and a liquified summer sky, interwoven among iridescent tiles exactly the type you might see poolside. Swimming through the center, the subject uses the momentum from his dive to bend, familiar with the antigravity of water. But his body is incomplete, is partially bisected by the other materials, as if his environment is in a similar state of rearrangement. Turner’s water and charcoal technique introduces new textures to the image. His subject is not only immersed in the water, but he becomes the water himself, dissolving into the significance of the artist’s collection, as if the backyard pool were one link in the waterways of a cruel and complicated history.

Khari Turner

Grandmother’s Garden

Portrait Society

Milwaukee, WI

Until August 22