The artist will make his debut with the gallery at the inaugural edition of Frieze's No.9 Cork Street initiative in October of this year.
James Cohan has announced its representation of Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Christopher Myers. The artist will make his debut with the gallery at the inaugural edition of Frieze's No.9 Cork Street initiative in October of this year, presenting an ambitious solo exhibition of new work in Mayfair, London. James Cohan will present a solo exhibition of Myers's work at its Tribeca location in February 2022.
Christopher Myers is an artist and writer whose work across disciplines is rooted in storytelling. Myers delves into the past to build narratives that speak to the slippages between history and mythology. His diverse practice spans textiles, performance, film, and sculptural objects, often created in collaboration with artisans from around the globe. He has worked with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Ho Chi Minh City, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, weavers in Luxor, metal workers in Kenya, and textile printers in Copenhagen. These collaborations are driven by his interest in understanding the ways in which globalization is intimately intertwined with notions of self and community. Myers is part of a lineage of artists for whom the seemingly domestic and ornamental quality of tapestries belies a rich tradition of radical craft. This medium has created physical space and pathways for resistance and liberation within the handmade object. In his ongoing series of textile works, Myers uses appliqué, a technique that appears often in quilting and banner making, and has developed as a tangible union of diverse cultural and visual practices-African, European, and American. Working with a community of artisans in Luxor, Egypt, Myers has created tapestries with textiles as varied as 70-year-old sail cloth, Nigerian wedding lace, World Food Programme grain sacks, and cotton harvested in Xinjiang and printed in Vietnam. He works with materials that hold histories-of movement, migration, and exchange-within them.History is the story of where you have come from, mythology is the story of why and where you are going. My work as a storyteller and as an artist centers on pulling mythologies apart from official records. Especially for African-Americans and other marginalized folks, we must learn to read these records for our unwritten histories, to see ourselves in the empty spaces on the page.
Videos