Description:
landscape with four trees in the background each with a human face on it, two men in the foreground, one with white shoes, blue slacks and green shirt turning toward the other who has black shoes, white stockings, red fur trimmed jacket holding a white mask in his proper left hand with his proper right hand holding elbow of the other man
Label Text:
John Bankston uses the bold outlines of children’s coloring books to create his own visual narratives drawing on fantasy, science fiction, and adventure stories. Unmasked belongs to the series Locating Desire, comprised of twenty drawings and five paintings that incorporate imagery from works in the collection of the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Masks of various kinds become a thematic link in the story, which addresses adult themes of desire, sexual identity, and race.
The narrative begins in a gallery-like setting with a young African-American man, who is shown viewing a large orange coffin in the shape of a cocoa pod by the Ghanaian artist Kane Kwei. He falls into a dreamlike state and awakens naked with the coffin in an unfamiliar landscape. A man in an eighteenth-century court costume gives him clothes and introduces him to a number of male characters, all in masquerade. The protagonist is given his own mask to wear by a bear and two men in a horse suit, who act as his guide on a journey of frustrated desires through scenes recalling the De Young’s nineteenth-century American landscapes. In Unmasked the protagonist (on the left) is shown in a magical forest of trees that have human faces and phalluses. A Mardi Gras figure removes the protagonist’s mask, symbolically unmasking the young man’s sexual desires. The journey ultimately culminates in a South Seas island utopia reminiscent of Gauguin’s Tahiti and inspired by the De Young’s painting Boy Party (1954) by the artist known as Jess.
In this series Bankston addresses the museum as a locus of desire: “In this [the museum’s] world, objects are enticingly displayed but cannot be touched. It is a place of constant desire: the desire to touch/experience, the desire to own, the desire to create.”
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2007.30.2 |
