John Alleyne takes God's gift and confronts concept of perfection in exhibition at Sulfur Studios

The latest gift God has granted him comes in the form of a series of silkscreen monotype prints titled “...in a perfect world, I would be perfect, world,” a lyric from the Kendrick Lamar track.

The collection will be presented in Sulfur Studios, located at 2301 Bull Street, from Thursday, March 31 to Saturday, April 23, with the opening reception on Friday from 5-9 p.m.

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

As Alleyne looks back, this may have been an exhibition decades in the making. He recalls when he was a young boy back in his birthplace of Barbados. It was his first time in a barber’s chair, his feet didn’t even touch the ground yet.

“By the end of it, my skin was just so inflamed, because the barber was maybe pressing too hard with the clippers or something,” Alleyne says. “I don't know. Long story short, it was a traumatizing experience in a way.”

Alleyne then contrasts this with the times he spent on the opposite side of the aisle — the hair salon. Because he’d decided to get locs later in life (when his feet could now touch the ground), he spent time among Black women, exposing himself to a similar but wildly different social culture.

While he considered these both safe spaces and places of belonging for Black people, the conversations that happened in each space reflected the varied gendered perspectives.

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

“It's so interesting that my point of view can be completely different to the person sitting next to me,” Alleyne says. “I mean, I love hearing about [what] women think about Black men especially, or [what] Black men think about Black women.”

It’s this complex overlap of conversation and perspective that inspires the expressive, free-flowing execution that isn’t typical of the screen printing practice. When Alleyne was pursuing a graduate degree in studio art at Louisiana State University, a professor let him sit in on a few screen printing classes.

“I always knew that I wanted to dive into printmaking, but I wasn't really interested in doing the ones that were super technical, where it was heavily processed,” Alleyne says.

This more relaxed approach led to an accidental smearing of ink on canvas, which led to a more intentional experimentation of using the prints as collage elements layered over those same smears. The result? A more graphic image that plays with space and movement.

Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Credit: Courtesy of the artist

That dynamic movement is an element Alleyne got real familiar with as a teen running around New York, tagging with his friends. When he was 16-years-old, he bounced from Barbados to Brooklyn to stay with his aunt. Although his aunt lived “hood-adjacent,” Alleyne still had to pass through the hood to get to school, where he was immersed in street, gang, and graffiti culture.

“[Tagging] was something I hadn't seen in Barbados, and it was something I was immediately drawn to, you know, because it was kind of like the cool thing to do.”

Again, in reference to the Lamar lyric, Alleyne connects this back to the print series, “I'm not necessarily looking for your traditional, perfect print.” Instead, he’s  “looking for one that has imperfections, that expresses the expressive quality similar to tagging and graffiti and this activation that happens when spray paint hits a wall.”

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

Credit: Courtesy of Sulfur Studios

Graffiti also reflects the conversational aspect of the collection. Just as Alleyne layers and creates patterns of single-image prints, the same happens when layering a graffiti piece over an already tagged wall. It’s this mystery, this connection with other artists by adding to their work with his own that imitates the intersection of conversations he’s heard in barber shops and hair salons.

There’s also a sense of urgency in graffiti that Alleyne applies to his screen printing process. Initially, the more rigid, result-focused approach he learned in graduate school was butting heads with the carefree creativity of his youth. But once he reconnected with that brazen Brooklyn attitude, he not only unlocked the images he was aiming for but also the message of embracing imperfection he was trying to communicate.

“I'm creating. It might fail, it might be great, but I enjoy all of it,” Alleyne says. “I enjoy the journey of creating it.”

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: John Alleyne takes God's gift and confronts concept of perfection in exhibition at Sulfur Studios