Scheherazade Washington Parrish challenges perceptions of gender in ‘Christian mythology’ in first solo show

In ‘Tools of Redaction: FORM’ at Ferndale’s M Contemporary Art, the artist adds a new sculptural element to her poetry

By Randiah Camille Green on Fri, Sep 22, 2023 for the Detroit Metro Times

You are stepping into a poem when you walk into M Contemporary Art to see Scheherazade Washington Parrish’s latest work. It says so on the wall.

Fragmented stanzas hang on the walls, ripped, distorted, and pieced together with crumbled Bible pages. This is Parrish’s first solo show, Tools of Redaction: FORM, and she continues to evolve, presenting new ways to present literary art.

Casts of women’s and men’s bodies are embedded into the work, adding a sculptural element we see from the writer and performance artist for the first time.

Parrish works in redactions, removing words from a written text to make a new poem within. The words are already there, it’s just a matter of finding the ones that speak to her in the undercurrent, using the original author’s own words to challenge their authoritative notions.

Typically her source material is the Bible, the dictionary, or the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

“Those are the authoritative texts of Western paradigm, how we are supposed to be,” she explains. “When we’re not this what does that look like? As a Black woman, I challenge the authority. I challenge all of these notions that have been laid out starting with creation, starting with this, I call it ‘Christian mythology,’ right? A creation of the rules of what a woman should be, what a man should be, and all of these things. I’m like, ehhhh.”

“Understand this gesture/charm is deceitful/beauty is…” a stanza distorted by crumpled paper trails off in the exhibit.

“‘Understand this gesture’ is skewed all balled up, and so I want to show you beauty is deceptive,” Parrish says.

The original poem reads, “Understand this gesture/charm is deceitful/ beauty is vain/a skewed perception of intimacy.”

The source material, Parrish’s streams of consciousness and several poems fused together, hangs on the back wall of the gallery. You can choose to either read it first and then find the stanzas on the wall, or vice versa.

This is Parrish’s third installation of her Tools of Redaction series. The first part, Tools of Redaction: [subMISSION] in 2021 was created from a petition by Hannah Black, demanding the Whitney Biennial to remove a controversial painting of Emmett Till in his casket by a white artist named Dana Schutz.

The second was Tools of Redaction: CODE as part of 2022’s Womxnhouse Detroit. In this series, she redacted an excerpt from Genesis to challenge the perception of women’s roles in the Bible. Visitors would uncover a poem by placing wooden panels over the text.

“It’s not my intention to challenge your belief,” she says. “It is my intention to make you take a look at it. Maybe try to locate yourself [in the Bible]. It is wild to me to hold a belief that I am absent in. In this narrative, I don’t have a place, specifically Black women don’t play in this authoritative text.”

Where to see her work: Tools of Redaction: FORM is up until Oct. 13 at M Contemporary Art.