Black and Yabut\u2019s practice of mirror drawing developed as a result of their contemplation of a photograph of Louise Bourgeois in her studio. As Black and Yabut looked back in time through a reverie of mimesis or common experience, what they saw in the photographic mirror could be shared endlessly. Within this imagined connectivity, all three artists approached what Fred Moten, reading and writing through Ralph Ellison\u2019s novel Invisible Man<\/em>, calls immeasurable.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Fred Moten, \u201cTo Feel, to Feel More, to Feel More Than,\u201d in How to Remain Human<\/em>, exh. cat. (Cleveland: MOCA, 2015), 59\u200a\u2014\u200a61. The exhibition took place June 12\u200a\u2014\u200aSeptember 5, 2015.<\/span> In an experience similar to the artists looking back in time (at themselves), Ellison\u2019s anonymous narrator speaks to an audience about looking \u201cfar down the dim corridor of history\u201d in which he \u201chear[s] the footsteps of militant fraternity!\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man<\/em>, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 346.<\/span> In this moment of addressing and being seen by a crowd of people, he feels home in a collective, shared past and present. This collective embrace, in turn, makes him feel more human. Moten then speculates that this feeling of being \u201cmore human\u201d is really an apprehension of being more than<\/em> human, which implies that a singular being detached from its dynamic becoming-with is less than human. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To feel more or more-than human is to escape the narrow confines of a caesured, individual human, of someone who can be represented as a single being in a certain time and space and, hence, is potentially feared, abject, and rendered invisible.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In their writing about their practice, Black and Yabut describe a conscious reaching across time and space to trace non-linear contours around an emergent collective body: \u201cWhen art historians and critics become conscious<\/em> of the partnerships between women, queer, and racialized artists, collaboration can be re\u00adframed as liberation and survival. We can begin to see that collaboration throws us what Sara Ahmed might call a \u2018life-line\u2019 across the canon\u2019s straight line of exclusion.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, \u201cRe: your exhibition,\u201d email to the author, March 30, 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time that individuals rediscover their collective body across spatial and temporal boundaries, they recognize their immeasurability. This is not to say that they disappear into the group; rather, they add to, and form part of, its immeasurable multitude, becoming immeasurable themselves in the process. I would posit \u201cinvisibility\u201d (meaning ungraspability, elusiveness) as a possible recuperation of social invisibility\u200a\u2014\u200aracism, sexism, and other forms of categorically based exclusion. \u201cInvisibility\u201d can here be sensed in two related parts: no longer seen as less-than, and yet ungraspable in its complexity; a refusal to be seen as one, and yet the impossibility of being seen as many. As Moten says, \u201cThe human is only ever visible as the more than complete incompleteness from which it cannot quite be seen.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Moten, \u201cTo Feel,\u201d 60.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, this dual sense of invisibility\u200a\u2014\u200aas non-figuration of both singular and plural self\u200a\u2014\u200amust be paired with a more literal sense of invisibility in order not to be seen as anything at all. This requirement stems from the need to evade the hyper-imaging technologies of global capitalism. Protesters do not just become invisible in numbers; they must wear masks as well. For people struggling against oppressive power today, as for Ellison\u2019s \u201cinvisible man,\u201d group camouflage is a matter of both psychological and more immediate, physical survival. Artist and writer Zach Blas cites a cultural turn to forms of the \u201cnon-visible\u201d in queer and identity-related art and theory, in the Occupy movement, and in the speculative realism of contemporary Western philosophy, associating these various forms of negation and withdrawal with the emergence of information capture, locative technologies, and the policing of life under cybernetic capitalism. In Blas\u2019s view, \u201cThis varied political stance, if it is united at all, demonstrates a withdrawal from forms of recognition control as well as a refusal or antagonism toward becoming perceptible and intelligible to powers of domination.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Zach Blas, \u201cQueer Darkness,\u201d in Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies<\/em>, ed. Carolin Wiedemann and Soenke Zehle, n.p. (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2012).<\/span> This is invisibility as shield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yabut and Black are attentive to these forms of domination and image capture in their own lives and, consequently, gravitate in their collaborative and individual practices toward non-representation, formalism, and abstraction. Yabut talks of feeling hindered by the current forms of representation of Asian women available to her and voices a concern that representation in her own work might \u201callow room for racism\/exoticism to be placed upon [it].\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Thea Yabut, \u201cRe: your exhibition,\u201d email to the author, March 21, 2017.<\/span> Recognizing the restriction of the figural or representational, she says, \u201cI\u2019ve always felt opposed to drawing my body in my work because my identity is always changing.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> As a queer, gender-flexible artist, Black also finds abstraction a useful vehicle for expressing pre-linguistic and non-binary states of embodiment. Resisting the use of figurative, recognizable forms that cut off the individual from its full becoming-with-others, Black and Yabut choose a language of abstraction and non-representation, thereby surpassing imprisonment within forms that are too limited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n But their collaborative work does not rest within the rhetoric and practice of negation, withdrawal or antagonism, or refusal to be seen as singular. Unlike queer artists who use darkness, illegibility, and opacity as modes of expression (which Blas aligns with failure, isolation, pain, and refusal), the queer spaces created by Black and Yabut offer more of a \u201cwomen\u2019s mode of communication [that] is about creating openings, questioning, and conversations.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Black, \u201cRe: your exhibition.\u201d<\/span> Non-representation in their practice is aligned with the notion of the immeasurable and a refusal to be seen as both one and many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The process begins with the creation of a space large enough for this opening to occur within. Two equal sides of a folded sheet of paper demarcate a space for exploration, away from and toward the central meeting axis. Black and Yabut describe how, in this way, \u201cthe sustained space of complete balance and negotiation during mirror drawing offers a constraint: the line demands that no one person takes up too much space, and the centre is only possible through meeting\u200a\u2014\u200aneither can establish the centre alone, and neither is centred.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> Although the central axis represents most clearly the conscious points of convergence, in practice, the artists\u2019 bodies and minds are constantly in contact during the whole process via this collective body (artists, pencil, paper) and their decision to work in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the polyvocal space that they have created, they are able to let a collective language pour forth.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Watching them engage in the mirror drawings makes me aware of how generous the process is, as the lines seem to flow out of their pencils in fluid swirls, tentative starts and stops, and bridges to carry on. It is almost as if, instead of choosing non-representation, they are representing too many things at once: forms that resemble insects, horned dragons, or orchids emerge, like chimeras or gestalts that surpass the singular form. Linda Besemer reads her own abstract painting and its queer language through Deleuze and Guattari, who describe \u201ca line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the vertical and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing directions, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em>, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 498\u200a\u2014\u200a99.<\/span> Similarly, Black and Yabut\u2019s abstract, mutable forms speak to the constantly evolving nature of identity not only within<\/em> a subject but also through<\/em> other subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black and Yabut cite Homi Bhabha, who understands identification as \u201ca process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification\u200a\u2014\u200athe subject\u200a\u2014\u200ais itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Homi Bhabha, \u201cThe Third Space \u2014\u200aInterview With Homi Bhabha,\u201d in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference<\/em>, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 211.<\/span> By using drawing as a tool of orientation (Ahmed), they bring many other bodies into the negotiation of a collective, such as materials, other artists\u2019 speculations and memories, and each other\u2019s embodied histories, current states, and desires. Drawing records the becoming-with of these material and psychological \u201cothers\u201d as they are incorporated into the \u201ccomplete incompleteness\u201d of each person. The pencil drawings are also retraced with paper knives, adding a dimension of negative space, and then chained together through accordion folds, which seem to stretch on forever, like an infinite hall of mirrors. The serial folds evoke the ongoing nature of the work as a negotiation of collective identity, as a process that is a continuation of the past and will stretch indefinitely into the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Concomitant with Black and Yabut\u2019s refusal to be seen as bounded individuals who are detached from larger, immeasurable processes of collective becoming-with is the appreciation that each artist cannot be fully seen in her complexity either. This relates to how I\u2019m using invisibility in two senses: while there is a desire to hold the space of collective becoming-with, it is reliant on the invisibility or non-appearance of both the singular and<\/em> the more-than-singular subject. Yabut elucidates this barrier as one of respect: \u201cOne thing we always stress to each other is that we don\u2019t want to say our identities are interchangeable. We have a deep respect for not fully understanding each other\u2019s position.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Yabut, \u201cRe: your exhibition.\u201d<\/span> Built into their mirror-drawing process is the limitation that each person can only go where the collective body goes, and this is determined by each other\u2019s respective experiences and what they allow out or in. In this way, their process respects the immeasurability\/invisibility of the collective body, as well as of each other\u2019s individual bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I move along the sequential pages of Black and Yabut\u2019s open book of cut-out mirror drawings, the light plays with the sculptural forms against the wall. The effect of the elaborate alternating shadow-and-light forms reminds me of the scene in Herzog\u2019s Cave of Forgotten Dreams<\/em> in which he supposes that the creators of the Chauvet cave paintings would have animated their painted animals with flickering firelight. In the flashes of motion between distinct perceptions, the shadows come alive; in a dance of transience are immeasurable beings that you won\u2019t ever see clearly. Hannah Black writes that art, like life, does not yet know how to go deeper into the collective head that Moten, via Ellison, describes.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Hannah Black, \u201cThis Is Crap,\u201d Frieze, <\/em>no. 23 (Spring 2016), <frieze.com\/article\/crap>.<\/span> But for now, the collaborative, abstract drawings of Black and Yabut, which elicit total responsiveness to the collective body, begin to record the invisible, immeasurable process of becoming-with others. <\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO04_Williamson_Black-et-Yabut_MirrorDrawingBook-scaled.jpg\")
Mirror Drawing Book<\/em>, detail, 2016.
Photo : Anthea Black, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO04_Williamson_Black-et-Yabut_MamanandMe.jpg\")
Maman and me<\/em>, video still, 2012-2015.
Photo : Anthea Black, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO04_Williamson_Black-et-Yabut_TwoFold02-scaled.jpg\")
Two-Fold: Twice as Great or as Numerous<\/em>, 2015-2017.
Photo : Anthea Black, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n