“I am here because you were there,” reads the black neon sign, glowing bleakly. It quotes the now shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, from an impassioned 2018 speech in response to the Windrush scandal. The neon, by Southend-based artist Elsa James, hangs over the entrance to Rites of Passage, a group exhibition of 19 black artists who all, in different ways, have their own stories and histories of migration. Set against strong blue walls, this is one of those one-thing-after-another shows in which disparities of scale, medium, subject matter, intention and artistic language are so varied it is hard to make sense of it all. Lammy’s quotation is succinct, direct and so freighted that the rest of the show finds it hard to keep up the pace, let alone the focus.
Patrick Quarm’s painted portraits are strange hybrids, between realist and fantastical. Quarm’s figures – all friends or family of the US-based Ghanaian artist – pose as though for formal portraits, yet their skin and faces as well as their clothes are often patterned with dizzying wax-print fabric designs. Even the backgrounds are covered in yet more pattern and hot colour. These unstretched images are held out from the gallery wall by life-sized resin arms and hands, which proffer them to us. Painted limbs intrude in the pictures, too, covering the sitters’ mouths, ears and eyes. This game of see no evil, speak no evil, provides further complication. It all feels overdetermined and overcooked.
