Traction: Art Talk with Sadie Barnette
Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CaliforniaWhether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s acclaimed artworks relish in the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. Recent works engage as primary source material the 500-page FBI surveillance file kept on her father, Rodney Barnette, who founded the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968. In the artist’s hands these repressive documents are reclaimed — splashed with pink spray paint and adorned with crystals — in an intergenerational assertion of the power of the personal as political. Barnette’s work deals in the currency of the real, in earthly acts of celebration and resistance, but is also tethered to the other-worldly, a speculative fiction, a galactic escape.