Dominic Chambers is interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, recontextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, and views painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor, as much as it is aesthetic.

The exhibition takes its title from James Baldwin’s 1962 Letter to My Nephew, where Baldwin describes black life as being a reality constructed and sustained by the white imagination. The text suggests that, consequently, black people have had to traverse a haunting social and psychological landscape in the pursuit of freedom, equality, and self-actualization. The works by Dominic Chambers in What Makes the Earth Shake highlight the surreal conditions pervading black life. Surrealism manifests on the periphery of a seemingly ordinary experience, where racial undertones are the shadows of conversation.

“Too often, the black body has been located in our imaginations as one incapable of rest,” Chambers explains. “Often when we imagine what the black body is doing, it is usually an act of labor, rebellion, or resistance.”

- Dominic Chambers

The paintings in the exhibition insist on destabilizing the laborer, rebel, and insurgent roles for black people and assert the importance of authorship over one’s own reality. Forging images of the black body, undisturbed, in radiant fields of color, Chambers foregrounds the black subject and color-field painting as harmonious companions. He proposes crucial spaces for contemplation within which his subjects can forge and reforge relationships with their minds, bodies, and souls.

“Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”

– James Baldwin, A Letter to My Nephew

With literature being an important touchstone in his work, Chambers marries written with visual recontextualizing cultural narratives through the profound use of color, layers, and imagined space. By presenting the opportunity to witness a self-determined black body in a moment of leisure, Chambers work makes a profound declaration on the American consciousness and provides an important reminder – to make the earth shake.

Exhibition Catalogue with Checklist