• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Phoenix Bird (detail)
• Rashid Johnson — Untitled (Rug)
• Rashid Johnson — The Sting of the Bee

What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?

A disparate and limited vocabulary of objects and icons arranged into… nonsense? For instance: an Afgan rug branded with NWA crosshairs and palm trees, with an uncomfortable looking zebra-skin chair and a forty-pound block of butter sitting atop it. Race, certainly; the war in Afghanistan maybe? Carver on the wall tag + a block of African nut butter = self-sufficiency and ideas about agriculture vis-à-vis race? I can start to draw connections but the pieces leave me confused in a very basic way. Puckish absurdist humor. Also the feeling of dark gaudy 1970s domestic spaces which have been shattered and smeared. With butter.