AoR
Ronald
Lockett
Fever Within (1995)
Ronald Locket (1965-1998) was a visual artist based in Bessemer, a post-industrial urban satellite of Birmingham Alabama. He left behind a collection of 350 abstracted landscape paintings. His collaged sculptural works were embedded in a body of Black art emerging in the South after the Civil Rights Era and were informed through his personal relations to a group of Black artists active in wider Birmingham, most notably through the mentorship of his older cousin Thornton Dial who lived just down the road in Pipe Shop neighbourhood and of his great aunt, Sarah Dial Lockett, a creator of beautifully sculpted quilts.
The Enemy Amongst Us (1995)
Lockett’s work speaks to the lived realities of constraint of Black life in the South’s rust belt, how these realities are felt intimately, and stretch across, resonate with, wider historical events and personal histories. This political weight makes itself felt through, for instance, his Oklahoma series commemorating the white supremacist bombings of federal buildings in Oklahoma city in 1995. And the Traps series, that center around a deer in various stages of entrapment. There is a deep negativity expressed through Lockett’s artworks, both thematically and materially. But we do not read his work as only a negative expression, and are struck by the lines of escape, refusal and living otherwise promised, if not ever present through his art-making and the materiality of the work he left behind.
A Place In Time (1989)
Ronald Lockett constructed his collaged sculptures from rusted sheets of metal repurposed from their original use as cladding on now decommissioned steel factories and neighbourhood sheds, and other found metal objects and paint. His artwork, for us, is deeply embedded in continuities of ruination, pertaining to themes of degradation, vulnerability, and death that resonate through his work. His delicate collages attend to embodied experiences of dehumanisation and their associated violences, and intimately engage with rust and the repurposing of discarded materials. And yet, his work, nevertheless presences intimate, aesthetic interventions - lines of flight, really - that express a refusal to be wholly contained by forces that entrap and incapacitate. We encounter in and through Lockett’s work an aesthetic of waywardness and a haptic ‘feeling with and through’ that we understand as fugitive strategies to refuse capture and move towards more liveable worlds.
Verge Of Extinction (1994)
Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die (1996)
Alongside his abstract industrial landscapes, figures haunt his artworks, opening a space for life within and through rusted metal slabs, fencing and other discarded materials. In his work Once Something Has Lived, It Can Never Really Die a deer appears, partially, symbolizing the continuity of life, perhaps, or movements towards living otherwise, elsewhere, perhaps. Fever Within bears witness and pays tribute to a friend who passed away following AIDS related illness. Themes of death, loss, remembrance are evidenced in the artwork, and yet, simultaneously, their presence is in no sense immediate or representational. In Lockett’s wayward aesthetic gestures we sense the potential and potency of his interventions in landscapes shaped by the social materialities of entrapment, abandonment, rupture and decay. Such pathways of flight and refusal invite us to reconsider, what it might mean to generate emotional and sensory speculations of ‘presents’ still to be lived? And what is at stake? What ways of living otherwise might have been made possible through such fugitive gestures?