A BEAUTIFUL PROXY: Jasmine Best

A BEAUTIFUL PROXY
SOLO SHOW BY JASMINE BEST

August 27th through October 3rd

A type of low grade terror pervades Jasmine Best’s work in her inaugural Lump show, A Beautiful Proxy. Mangled Black femme bodies, rendered in various types of fabrics, serve as the base for an ethical and social atrocity that Jasmine underscores: the exploitation of black bodies for commodity, paired conveniently with our distorted sense of beauty, which she calls out as being oppressively anglocentric.

Horrors aside, the work is exquisitely made, invigorating to look at and brilliantly intertwined. Soft sculptures point toward fabric collages, which in turn point toward videos that nod to unconventional works on paper. The show takes an immovable stance in the gallery, inhabiting the space with gravitas and beauty. But the more the colors pop, and the looser the fabric hangs, the more you’ll feel a primal fear building under the surface. It’s telling you that something is wrong, something that you’ve known all along.