NEW HAVEN – Three ships are sailing through the lobby of the Yale Center for British Art. Suspended from skylights in the four-story atrium, the large-scale sculptures are decked out with doll-house precision: cabins, hand-stitched sails, fishnet-covered cargo, bits of seaweed trailing from the lines — but utterly crew-less, passenger-less.
They make a sweeping entrance into YCBA’s Hew Locke: Passages, on exhibit through mid-January. The exhibit gathers work from the Guyanese British artist across a thirty-year period. In a first-ever retrospective ranging across Locke’s body of work, the exhibit showcases his sculptural assemblage of plastic objects, wood constructions, watercolor, large-scale photography, and more.
Locke takes apart images of power; he maraudes the marauders. Across multiple media, he dissects symbols of imperialism and colonization, particularly the legacy of the British empire.
Then he re-envisions them: a statue of a colonial slave trader is weighed down with chains of fake gold. The Queen’s Coat of Arms is rendered tattered, threadbare, stapled at the seams. An antique share certificate from a real estate company is doodled over with a city’s high rises. Locke works often bloom into gorgeous floral-like profusions. There’s radical messaging encoded in every stitch — but the work is also boggling with beauty.
Locke uses visual branding to great effect. In a press tour opening the exhibit, he noted, “I think it’s Matt Groening, of the Simpsons fame, who said, ‘to have a successful image you need to recognize the silhouette instantly.’ If you see Bart Simpson’s silhouette, you know it instantly.” It’s Locke’s reconstitution of powerful images that make his work such a double-edged sword.
Take his Koh-i-noor from 2005, a floor-to-ceiling relief sculpture. From across the gallery, you can see that it’s clearly the silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II: the spiky crown, the turning profile, the sloping shoulders, bejeweled and sparkling. But there’s something “off” about the inside of it. Stepping closer, you see that the portrait is composed of tens of thousands of plastic parts: glittery toy swords, palm fronds, plastic roses, dolls’ heads, skulls, strings of Mardi Gras beads.
Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but crossed the Atlantic with his family to South America’s coastal Guyana in 1966. There as a child, he witnessed the country’s declaration of independence from Britain. Locke sees the ocean as the great global connector; he also noted that most of Guyana’s coast, where the majority of the population lives, lies about six feet under sea level.
Many pieces in the exhibit evoke Guyana’s land-and-sea legacy — and its legacy of British colonization. A series of watercolors, Guyana House Boats, show traditional houses perched on stilts and floated on boats. The doll-house-sized sculpture Jumbie House 1 — the name for abandoned haunted houses in Guyana — has British-style shutters hiding its interior. There are several images of a Queen Victoria statue in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, with the queen leaking royal colors, greening over, or fading into the landscape.
Riding through the heart of the YCBA exhibit are two especially powerful pieces. From Locke’s 2022 Ambassador series, commissioned by The Lowry gallery in Salford, Britian, medium-scale figures on horseback canter through the gallery. Locke appropriates the familiar trope of military calvary, but his equestrians are different: they are Black warriors, resplendently styled in a sort of neo-futuristic warrior garb. They seem to be riding towards a post-apocalyptic world. They are calm but formidable — armed for prophesy as much as war. Ornamented with symbols of slavery, huge headdresses, and leather-tooled gear, they sit regally in the stirrup. The female figure flies a huge black banner without device. The male figure’s horse is encrusted with skulls, his pistol double-barreled.
These figures have a tangible, unnamed power, more felt than spelled out. They carry talismans — experiences of trauma and triumph — from the past toward the future. But toward what future, exactly? That, Locke seems to suggest in a profusion of detail, is up to the viewer.