Double Exposure: Alexis Rivierre and Tiffany J. Sutton at Museum Blue

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” writes Audre Lorde, in a well known passage from the epilogue of her cancer journals. 1 The passage comes at the end of a decade-long catalogue of days in which Lorde traveled, wrote, and met with Black women of the Diaspora around the globe, and it was this passage that came to mind when I first encountered the curatorial vision of Museum Blue’s virtual exhibition Take Care, Vera, curated by Michael Behle and Lauren Cardenas and slated to run from September 20 through December 20, 2021.

The title of the exhibition is a portmanteau: Take Care is the title of an ongoing series by the New York City-based multidisciplinary artist Alexis Rivierre (b. 1991), and Vera is part of the title of a series by the St. Louis-based photographer Tiffany J. Sutton (b. 1981). These two artists who are featured in the show came together to present an entrancing dual meditation on what it means to be a caretaker, what it means to survive and preserve both oneself and others in the politically transformative way that Lorde described over thirty years ago. The show’s curators Behle and Cardenas identify the Black women who are depicted throughout Rivierre and Sutton’s respective works as “powerful figures who provide care for others.” 2

“Yet the question remains,” Behle and Cardenas write, “who cares for them?” 3

That figure who cares for the caretaker haunts the works in this exhibition on a formal level, in its double exposures. The use of multiple exposures to create a glitch-like effect is first evident in Rivierre’s video performance Exhale (2021). This video documentation of a performance, presented in three parts totaling just over four minutes, features Rivierre fashioned as a character named The One Who Breathes. The One Who Breathes wears a mask made from reclaimed jeans, braids, and reflective gems and gloves hand-sewn from reclaimed jeans, miscellaneous fabrics, and more reflective gems. She holds what she calls a “tool,” which she wields at times like a whip and at times like a broom and is made from strands of braided blue and black hair. In the video, she enacts broad, rhythmic gestures toward the ground and toward the viewer as she exhales, her breath giving pulse to the performance. Throughout the video, one can see multiple versions of The One Who Breathes fading in and out of view. The way her gestures are superimposed evokes multiple temporalities, positioning the figure’s solitary efforts as a form of ritual. Through the character’s gestures, one can infer that The One Who Breathes is a caretaker. Her ritual can be read as that of caring for the earth, particularly when she bends close to the ground and touches the dry sand with her hands.

In her artist statement, Rivierre describes her process as a “fractured” one. 4 Indeed, the collected works in Take Care, Vera highlight the fragmented details of daily life, but they present these details not as truncated, incomplete parts of a broken whole but instead as whole and complete in themselves. The triple exposure in Exhale creates the image of a kaleidoscopic self that functions as a meditation on what it means to see and feel oneself reflected and multiplied. This multiplication of the self evokes a kind of imagined companionship, an antidote to solitary struggle, that seems to stand in for self-care.

The optically rendered twin as a figure of self-care occurs also in Tiffany J. Sutton’s photographic series A Woman Named Vera, the other half of Museum Blue’s Take Care, Vera. The series follows, primarily, a Black woman named Vera, Sutton’s mother, as she is pictured alone, completing household chores, at rest, reading, and deep in thought, and with a man, Sutton’s father, who is pictured wearing a nasal cannula and seems to be undergoing treatment at a hospital. The intimate portraits resonate with a line from Sutton’s artist statement, which reads, “I am determined to catch every moment in the subjects’ life.” 5 The photographs in this series possess a candid documentary sensibility. Sutton’s camera is pointed at her subjects, such that even when they are looking back and acknowledging the presence of the photographer, or when her image appears bent over a tripod in the mirror, the photographer’s body is not centered or foregrounded. Only in the silver gelatin print titled “The Twin I Needed” (2002) does the photographer appear as the main subject. In this photograph, two images of Sutton appear. The figures stand outdoors on a dark night, wearing the same clothes and the same glasses. The figure on the left turns to glance at the figure on the right, who peers head-on into the camera. In this double exposure, in the context of the series, the mirror image of the self provides comfort as a kind of caretaker, whose presence offers guidance and commiseration.

In the series A Woman Named Vera, “The Twin I Needed” stands out not only because it depicts Sutton outside the context of her family but also because its title reveals a deeply vulnerable state of being lodged in an otherwise detached, documentary-style project. The doubled image throws open the concept of care and reveals the intricacies and contradictions of what we might have thought was a straightforward transaction of give and take.

In both Rivierre and Sutton’s works for Museum Blue, the multiplying images of Black women ask the viewer, as the curators of Take Care, Vera have: Who is a caretaker—the survivor—and who cares for them?

Jenny Wu,
Writer and art historian
jennywu488@gmail.com