Artist Statement:
“The Bad Air Smelled of Roses” (2005-Present)
90 Letterpress Broadsides, Dimensions Variable.
Black modernists writers Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed inspired my meditations
about the expansive meanings and implications of Blackness and marginality.
For me, Blackness not only includes notions of African-American identity
but also cosmic/galactic ideas as well as everything that exist outside
the edge of the repressed barrier of our individual and collective consciousness.
The unseen, the intangible, the entire realm of the subconscious and various
psychological/emotional states are also poetically associated with Blackness.
Blackness contains everything we don’t know, can’t know, about
to know and all things misunderstood or forgotten.
click image to enlarge
The text for the posters was written by myself and from a wide array of sources from Freud and Descartes to African-American artists and thinkers including Sun Ra, Missy Elliott, and Malcolm X. Lines from the movies, “The Matrix” and “Casablanca” were also used. “The Bad Air” creates a constellation of referential signs that articulate Blackness like the stars in the night sky articulate the endless, unlit void of outer space. With the use of humor together with an unconventional narrative organization, it is my intention to upset the ways in which the viewer read and construct meaning from written texts by forcing him/her to provide the context and subtext with and between the signs. My goal with “The Bad Air” is to inspire discovery, revelation, insight and epiphany in the mind of the viewer about the infinite possibilities of Blackness.
Joking, jabbing, mystifying, the words weave through and around the elusive subject of blackness, whether embodied in aspects of contemporary African-American culture, in half-buried histories or in forms yet to be identified and defined. The show is, in effect, a spread-out book of poetry in magnetic graphic form. The language is incredibly rich, as are the ideas and metaphors it generates. Mr. Pope has gone from writing on the body—his own—to writing on the mind, ours. And he's a strong enough artist to make the cumulative effects, as his work continues to develop, indelible.
—Holland Carter, The New York Times
