“Steps Into Shadow” by Senghor Reid
Steps Into Shadow
Self-Portraits in Gilda Snowden’s Chronicle Series
By Senghor Reid
The Detroit streets were pumping in the late 1980s. Mayor Coleman A. Young was in the latter half of his 5-term tenure as Detroit’s mayor. It was the golden age of basketball in Detroit as the Pistons dynasty was taking form. It was a pivotal time in the city’s history as would soon begin its final approach to becoming an American Future City. Also, during this time, the fine arts community was beginning to flourish. Metropolitan Detroit was home to many galleries, creative spaces, cultural publications, and art organizations, as artists continued a rich tradition of building community through the arts. Gilda Snowden was one of several artists at the forefront of this ever-expanding coterie.
Born in 1954, Gilda Snowden attended Cass Technical High School where she studied fashion and textiles. She went on to study psychology, social work, and painting at Wayne State University, receiving her B.F.A. in 1977 and M.F.A. in 1979. Gilda went on to produce an expansive body of work in the thousands until her untimely death in 2014. Gilda worked broadly in a variety of media including, but not limited to, photography, assemblage, construction, collage, encaustic, drawing, and painting.
One day my mother and I visited Gilda’s 5th floor loft in the heart of downtown Detroit on East Grand River. I had been there before. It was situated in a great location above Spectacles clothing store. Upon entering the space, I was immediately greeted by a long white wall where she neatly tacked and ordered multiple sheets of paper hung side by side. Throughout other parts of the space Gilda had a full matrix of extension cords and wires connected to a series of portable aluminum clamp lights affixed to tripods, the backs of chairs, storage shelves, and any other piece of stable furniture in the space. Many of the lights were situated to provide Gilda with as much light as possible when she worked. But others were positioned and focused directly on the wall like spotlights, providing her with an incredibly harsh light.
These lights were specifically oriented to aid Gilda in the creation of her “Chronicle” series. A Chronicle is a historical chronology of events arranged in order of time often without additional commentary, interpretation, or analysis. In her “Chronicle” drawings Gilda endeavored to make a record of her existence devoid of any facial features or identifying physical traits, except for her profile and the interplay of her hair. In this she was able to strip down her visual narrative to include only the impression of her existence in space and the energy of her light expressed through her use of color. Working in this way allowed Gilda to work metaphysically, dealing simultaneously with her physical body, reflection, shadowed self, and silhouette.
I remember Gilda taking the time to show us her method. She turned on one of the shop lights and stepped in front of it so that her body was between the light and her paper mounted on the wall. The sheets hung just high enough to capture a projection of her silhouette as it appeared on the paper. She collected her long elegant locs with her left hand, bundling them together on top of her head. I watched, entranced, as she manipulated her locs into knots, buns, halos, mohawks, towers, side-sweeps, up-dos, crowns, twists, braids, and any other creative, abstract form to create organic shadowed shapes. Her profile rested sharply on the paper as she used her right hand to trace her figure.
In the graphite drawings Gilda used energetic marks to describe the presence of her body as positive space or the negative space surrounding the profile of her ‘absent’ figure. These gesture drawings related directly to her tornado paintings for which she was most known for at that point in her career. Many of these portraits featured her body warping and transforming into loosely and tightly structured tornadoes. In contrast, Gilda’s form in the pastel drawings is often tautly rendered as her gestural marks are applied in a more controlled and conservative manner. Relying on the strength of her palette, she used color to create an engaging violent tension intrinsically at peace with itself.
Gilda always worked on many different works at the same time. Working in multiples provided her with an opportunity to spread out ideas across many different surfaces and kept her creativity from ever getting stuck. Gilda’s approach to making art yielded countless thematic variations, optimizing her levels of production, and creating consistent rhythm throughout her work. This ensured that a multitude of visual ideas would be captured and contained in their own space. Gilda was very strategic and actively avoided piling too many ideas on one single surface. She carefully allowed for each visual notation and color scheme to have its own composition, yielding highly cohesive bodies of work that were like families of visual iterations for that given period. This methodology enabled her to maintain a diversity of images, while allowing ample room for success and failure. It also gave her an opportunity to make many works in large volume at the same time. It was liberating, beautifully messy and brilliantly efficient.
As a result, Gilda never rested with a single definition of self, constantly reinterpreting, redefining, and redirecting her self-portrait with great urgency. Rather than exploring facial features and their finite capacity of visual language, she explored a more dynamic self-portrait, intuitive, endlessly malleable, and faceless. She was released from external constraints and free to journey into uncharted self-exploration. It was as if she were searching for a most perfect visage, knowing that one such mark of so-called perfection would never come to be in any one single drawing.
Many of the pastel and color medium drawings in “Chronicle” also prominently feature the triangle, both upright and inverted. The triangle has been used throughout history to represent religious, spiritual, mystic, and metaphysical trinities, creativity, gender, elemental forces, and endless number of other meanings. In her “Chronicle” series Gilda uses the triangle to represent elemental forces of fire, water, air, and earth combining to create the form of a tornado. The tornado as a concept provided the nucleus of Gilda’s iconographic system of symbols. Artist and curator Dick Goody referred to Gilda’s tornado as her “defining leitmotif”. In his view the tornado was like a repeating melodic musical phrase representing a character, setting, emotion, theme, or action distinctly associated with Gilda Snowden. In her work it operated as subject, image, theme, and over-arching doctrine, navigating the visual structure of much of her work throughout her career.
As I observe these drawings with a heavy heart, I notice my rising adrenaline. Seeing an artist work this way totally changed my fundamental understanding of what a portrait could become when an artist abandons conventional notions of representation and their resulting facades. Over the years I have grown increasingly fascinated by this body of work. How did Gilda navigate these paths of self-discovery? What did she unearth at the intersections? Were these silhouette drawings implicitly intended to conceal or liberate her sense of identity? Why did she conclude that this was the best formula for self-discovery? These drawings are so much more than just an affirmation of one’s existence. They allow for the re-inscription of one’s identity and self-aesthetic, constantly restructuring and reconstituting the rules of defining the self in perpetuity. Experiencing Gilda as ‘silhouettist’ mapping the interconnectedness of her unfixed presence reveals the unique vulnerability of a brave artist searching for totality and finding solace in her own fleeting illusion.
Senghor Reid
2022
