Rayvenn D’Clark - Black + White = Grey

Picnic is proud to present Black + White = Grey, a brand new installation of 3D lenticular prints and text by Rayvenn D’Clark, exploring the way issues of race are viewed online.

For many people, the internet is the primary place where they discuss political issues. Often arguments are fuelled by memes and images that have been posted and re-posted. Sometimes it’s not clear what the original context of an image was, who created it, or why. In these murky waters, false information is easily mistaken as true, and crude stereotypes about people's lives are believed to be correct. When it comes to how the lives of black people are portrayed online, these fictions end up leaking out into the world, having real life effects on the people they speak about.

Rayvenn D’Clark breaks down these automatic, un-thought through ideas to reveal the fractured nature of what people take as truth. The focal point of D’Clark’s installation at Picnic, is the image of a close friend – an activist from The Congo, Horcelie Sinda. A body scan of Sinda was 3D printed, then photographed from multiple angles and layered into a lenticular, allowing multiple views to be present on the same image.

As with internet memes and viral images, the figure in the lenticular is a copy of a copy of a copy, the original person is far away. However, through keeping this strong black figure as a constant from every viewpoint, D’Clark seeks to positively reframe the way people interact with and perpetuate images of black peoples.