Raquel Tripp: Between Believing and Knowing

For Raquel Tripp, an artist who grew up in Tennessee and Southern California, the space
between believing and knowing is an ongoing source of exploration. Believing, which involves
faith, does not require verification, but knowing, which is rational and requires proof, does.
Applying this dichotomy to images and image making has allowed her to examine African
American history and identity in both personal and cultural frameworks.

As a young woman Tripp was advised by her elders to stay safe by avoiding being seen since
media images of Black people so often involved negative portrayals. Understandably, Tripp
became hyper-aware of the power of images to both deflect and mis-inform. Working at first
with photography, Tripp felt it was her job to take a documentary stance and direct others
towards truth and rationality. Over time, that seemed too restrictive. Now, in her recent
paintings, something more complicated is happening. Tripp has developed an artistic practice
that involves a search for reality—both personal and historical—but does so moving through
and processing confusion, leaving space for irrationality and spirituality. It is an uncomfortable
way of working, but one which allows the artist to work through social and political blind spots,
combining, re-perceiving and re-purposing fresh narratives.

This approach has resulted in an ambitious 9-foot wide painting, “Blithe Spirit” which is a
figurative charcoal painting created on carpenter’s paper with charcoal, cinnamon, nzu
(calabash clay), pastel, graveyard earth, acrylic medium, and cinnamon water. Its diverse
materials fuse traditional western media with elements suggested by Hoodoo, a blend of
African religious traditions, European folk magic, and Native American influences, once used by
slaves for healing and protection. The work’s imagery, which was digitally collaged before
being painted, evokes a shaded world with elements and figures that seem to span nearly two
centuries of American history. It is a kind of disrupted history painting in which ambiguity forces
viewers to search for answers. The questions that it raises, including “Just what is happening
here?” and “Who controls the meaning of this image?” are especially relevant to the problems
of imagery in the age of the internet and the rise of AI.

In a related installation, “Evidence of Absence, Absence of Evidence,” Tripp appears in a video
that plays over a heavily modeled Carpenter’s paper ground with added fissures and textures
as well as broken glass. Her dual presence—as both a creator and an actor in the emerging
composition—projects more questions, including this one: how responsible does an artist need
to be for the truths that viewers might glean from their creations? Committed to working the
intersections of surveillance, digital imagery and painting, Tripp is as interested in obscuring
her hybrid imagery as she is in framing it. She offers us a world of experience, but not a
didactic one, that invites careful inspection, empathy and understanding. Its a very ambitious
position for a young artist to take, but Tripp has a sense of responsibility, to herself and to her
community that endows her work with vibrancy and moral force.

– John Seed