Esmaa Mohamoud Explores What Remains After the Theft of Innocence in New Los Angeles Show

Summary

• Esmaa Mohamoud explores the fragility of innocence and the soul in What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?, now on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles
• Featuring five new shea butter and black granite sculptures, the show hones in on themes of mortality, sacredness and the precarity of existence through the lens of Black youth

At Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, Esmaa Mohamoud asks what remains after the theft of innocence and hits to the soul. What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?, titled after a line in Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken word track “Comment #1”, moves through questions of harm and racial injustice through the interiority of Black youth as they confront the precarity of their own existence.

Building on a body conceptual interventions into Black visual culture — be it Cadillac low riders, football garb, peacock chairs or butterflies — each of Mohamoud’s figures fracture expectation and invent anew. In this show, the artist turns to figurative sculpture to highlight the entanglements of trauma between generations of the past, present and future, while also granting space for tenderness, beauty and introspection.

Rich in cinematic tones, the works on view straddle ideas of mortality and sacredness. “In I Can’t Forget You (My Whole World Turns Blue),” in a teenage boy in a hood stands tall with his arms outstretched in an image that hovers between martyrdom and transcendence. In another corner lies “…NUMB,” a milky portrait of a young boy’s chilling encounter with mortality as he cradles a lifeless pigeon in his lap.

Central to the showcase is Mohamoud’s exercise of materiality. Shea butter, long a symbol of care and preservation, becomes one with charred animal bones, bringing forth a varied range of tone. Elsewhere, granite enters the gallery as gravitas itself, as the mirrored surface of  “The Souls of Black Folk,” a polished stone recreation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text, pulls audiences into the artist’s expansive universe where the spiritual emerges as a form itself.

The exhibition is now on view through November 15.

Roberts Projects
442 South La Brea Avenue,
Los Angeles, California 90036

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