Love is dangerous, 2024-2025 Pink granite from the decommissioned Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson monument, Charlottesville, VA in 104 parts
THE BICAMERAL Los Angeles exhibition “MONUMENTS” was always going to be an epochal must-see. Nothing less than the memorial ecology of the country was (potentially) at stake.
Divided between the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, the show’s two halves are calibrated quite distinctly in pacing and tone. At the Brick, the versatile gallery space becomes an abattoir where the base, plinth, socle, and aggregate parts of Charles Keck’s 1921 equestrian statue of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson—removed from its perch before the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021—have been transmogrified into sites of reuse and reconstitution by the artist Kara Walker, who serves as a cocurator of the show, along with Bennett Simpson and Hamza Walker. At MoCA, ten twentieth-century sculptures dedicated as monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy commingle with a range of modern and contemporary works by nineteen artists and two collectives.
Around the corner from Henry and Miller’s conclave is a sumptuous new commission by Bethany Joy Collins. Working with a fragment of the base of Keck’s statue of Stonewall Jackson, Collins scoops into the porous viscera of rose granite and emerges with festoons of carved Carolina rose petals. The artist arranges these delicate yet weighty indexes of meaning across a white plinth to form a kind of écriture that resonates gloriously with her long-held interests in writing, erasure, and memory. Titled Love is dangerous, the 2024–25 work alludes to Decoration Day, on May 1, 1865, when the formerly enslaved residents of Charleston, South Carolina, transformed the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers into a carpet of flowers: an interracial act of gratitude recognized as the first Memorial Day. It is Collins’s exactitude of form, expertise in memory-work, and archival witness that make this more than a response or gesture. This is a mercy.
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