For his first exhibition with moniquemeloche, Biggers will activate the street-level storefront “on the wall” project space with a site-specific installation emerging from his recent work with civil war-era and pre-1900 quilts.
Abstract grounds of patchwork are overlaid with painting and mark-making and superimposed with shapes from the artist’s ever-growing repertoire of iconic or loaded images. Though the extent of their use has been contested, Biggers plays off the notion that quilts were used on the Underground Railroad as signposts signaling “stations” or safe houses.” He creates a complex vista across which his protagonist (the vague outline of a well-known photograph of a slave’s scarred back) takes in a suggested landscape. In a stark reversal of the implied manifest destiny of much Romantic landscape painting, here Biggers complicates and reassesses this historical narrative.
