text by Karly Quadros
“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.
Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.
After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer.
KARLY QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about yourself, your practice, and how you got here?
KARICE MITCHELL: I live in Vancouver. I'm an assistant professor full-time at the University of British Columbia. I teach photography there. That work does inform my practice in a lot of ways.
I'm really interested in one publication in particular: Players magazine, which started in the early seventies and stopped in about 2005. It was dubbed as the Black Playboy at the time.
I did my master’s thesis during Covid, which was a terrible, weird time to be making art. I had moved back home, and I didn't have access to camera equipment. I was always a photographer, but the pandemic was a time for me to reassess. What can I do that's readily accessible and within my means?
I started going to used bookstores, and that's when I found Players magazine. At the time I had no idea what it was, but the images were intriguing to me. So I started making collages with the found imagery, and then after doing some more research for my thesis, I found that it was this really crucial publication for its time in terms of facilitating Black representation. The first editor-in-chief was a Black woman, and she really cemented a particular direction for the publication.
It has a really interesting history that intersects with politics, music, culture, and it was something that was reflective of its time. The women that were in the magazine, that were posing nude, there was a certain kind of allure to them. It felt distinct. It felt cultural, feminine, and very familiar in terms of the women in my family and their rituals of adornment, as well as my own. I was really interested in mining that subtext throughout the images in order to speak to its specific history.
QUADROS: That’s fascinating to hear that the first editor-in-chief was a woman.
MITCHELL: Especially for that kind of a publication, which we often attribute to facilitating or being simply for the male gaze – which it absolutely is. But something in my practice I'm interested in doing is looking at the images and asking, “What am I picking up on through my engagement and act of looking?”
QUADROS: Have you ever tried to reach out to her?
MITCHELL: She passed away a couple years ago. Her name is Wanda Coleman. There's one interview that she did. I forget when it was published. It seemed very early 2000s. She talks about the complexities of starting the magazine as a woman, the tensions that were present at the time. But she did also say at the time she had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted.
It facilitated this very distinct vision for the magazine. She left after a couple of issues, unfortunately. Then the magazine started to go into all of these different directions that I think appeal more to how we understand pornographic visual content today.
But I'm interested in those pivots and in the kind of shifts. With Silke’s show, a lot of the images were from the 2000s, which is seen as being the era that is the most “dirty” or “trashy.” But is there room, maybe, to filter some kind of agency with these images as well?
Engaging with these images from the early 2000s, I see so much of video vixen culture or those modes of representation and femininity – a lot of body modification. There’s this pivot where there’s this very bold risk-taking in terms of the ways in which Black women were adorning themselves. There’s longer nails. There’s a lot of tattoos.
QUADROS: Maybe we can speak a little about adornment – jewelry, acrylics, tattoos – in that era, and how they related to Black women, their bodies, and Black culture more broadly.
MITCHELL: This is something that I think about all the time, as a Black woman. In a family or a lineage of other Black women, a lot of us are born into these rituals of self adornment. When I was born, the first gift – and this is something that I still have – you get a gold necklace. And it has your initial. It has a stamp affirming who you are. That kind of practice is so familial and feels really precious to me.
I think about my aunties in the early 2000s, their acrylics and like the sounds that they would make and what they would look like when they were speaking. It's something that I picked up on as a very young child and in a lot of ways has informed the way that I take up space today.
I think about my mother and corporate settings. She immigrated to Canada from the UK in the ‘90s. One of the things she would say, when she moved to Canada, was that everybody wears sweatpants. “Why don't people dress up when they're outside?” That proclamation of the way she represents herself, especially when she had to navigate the corporate world as a Black woman, was so important to her self-preservation.
Today what we're seeing is a lot of those trends being watered down and bastardized in the context of social media. What does it mean to stake a claim to something that is so authentically true to yourself, and then also watch it be denigrated, but then praised on certain bodies?
QUADROS: There’s this never-ending cycle of cultural innovation and then rejection, often by a white mainstream because that style is “in bad taste” or “too much” or “too Black.” But then there’s this eventual assimilation that we’re seeing happen now, especially with the early 2000s, in a way that feels very uncritical.
MITCHELL: I'm in Canada so it's a bit different, but I’ve been witnessing America swing this pendulum into a very sex negative, puritanical, evangelical view and positioning of sex, this anti-pornographic rhetoric. But if we rid pornography, that's not gonna rid us of patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogyny. It's always going to be there.
I also think about that ongoing rhetoric that is trying to demonize sex but then also permit it only in these weird, codified mainstream ways. It's all of these different contradictory things happening.
QUADROS: With your artwork, like where do you fall in that?
MITCHELL: In a way, it's complicating. I see my work as interventions to ask questions. I don't ever wanna say that the work is solving all the problems. That's not what I'm gonna do at all. I don't think art should do that.
When I initially started doing this work, I would have to follow this historical lineage around unearthing the kinds of traumas and violence that had been enacted against the Black female body. That's something that is oftentimes now not being taught in schools: the wars, the transatlantic slave trade and how the Black female body was this vessel of reproduction, labor, and this particular kind of violence that is misogynoir. In a way, I'm sitting with that.
I think my work and my interventions and my interpretations are trying to find the pleasure, find the joy, find the desire and the sexiness and in these subtle suggestions. I think I'm trying to imagine something otherwise. I love using familiarity in a way to ask unfamiliar questions.
QUADROS: This question of the archive and what to glean from it and what to leave, that's something that like Saidiya Hartman writes very clearly about.
With your work, you're taking us very close. Your work is intimate, almost interior. I find that really interesting because that's the way that sexuality is often expressed: erogenous zones, small touches, little moments like that. The things I love about my body are, for instance, these freckles I have right here on my face or my little tattoo. Your zooming in quality takes away some of the more objectifying quality.
MITCHELL: It’s kind of reorienting, or maybe a different way of looking. In the 2000s era, it was raunchy. It was there for a particular kind of gaze that I'm trying to reject in my own way.
I compared [my work] to when you're at the club, and you're in the girls' bathroom and all the women are like, “Oh my god, your hair, your nails, your outfit. Love it, love to see it.” And that's maybe the kind of approach. It’s like women taking some form of control given the kind of nature around the making of the images. So I love calling attention to those little details.
QUADROS: I love this idea of the girl's bathroom too because it makes me think of the “much-ness” of the work. I don't wanna say “too much-ness.” But there's something where the subjects can't be fully contained in the print. The images are so close. The words are spilling out onto the gallery walls. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how you engage with the frame and the idea of containment?
MITCHELL: The text has been a new step in the work, and I think it came out of me looking at the covers and seeing the way that on the cover of a magazine, the woman's shoulder would be covering a little bit of the text and like the body on the cover would be like spilling over in these moments. The text is also very particular, and it's very objectifying in a way, but the body is disrupting it. I was really interested in that small moment of disruption of the way this publication is trying to define the body.
It's all text found in the magazines themselves. Some of the pseudonyms of the models – like Angel and Candy and Sweetness – there's this kind of sugary quality to the names that I absolutely fell in love with. I really like this idea of persona and character and the way you represent yourself. What is your character? What is your armor? What do the nails and the hair and the earrings look like? How can I make this spill over into the work in this larger sense?
QUADROS: Persona comes up a lot in photography with subjects, right? You said you teach photography, so I imagine that's been a large part of your practice for a while.
MITCHELL: It becomes this generative site to determine how you want to represent yourself. I do think more complexly about representation as a whole, especially considering art and the art world, the kinds of representation that are deemed as “good” and then “not good” and feeding into this neoliberal understanding of representation, that just because more Black people are behind the frame, that's a good thing. But are we questioning the kinds of representation we're redeeming as being accessible, as being mainstream?
I think that pornography and committing to this archive in my work, has made a lot of people cautious. Like, why are you walking this line? But Black women were there, and I think that deserves our attention to some degree. That representation is there, so how are you gonna wrestle with it? I'm really interested in the gray area of representation.
QUADROS: Something about representation too is that it’s literally built into or excluded from the technology, right? Cameras originally weren't really constructed with darker skin tones in mind. It's really only been in the past couple decades when we're starting to see directors of photography, cinematographers that can actually handle darker skin tones. Like I just saw Sinners, and it looks spectacular. But it took us a while to get there.
MITCHELL: Oh my God. That movie. It's funny you actually bringing up that movie because I think the use of eroticism in that movie really stuck out to me. Like people assume that couldn't occur given the obviously violent systems in place, but for like sex and eroticism to still bleed out – I love it. It was so good.
QUADROS: And female pleasure, right?
MITCHELL: That’s right.
QUADROS: I saw that at Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is a little historic movie theater around here, and it was a sold out showing. And that was a crowd that was like hollering laughing. There was a man behind me that was audibly horny. (laughs)
MITCHELL: I love it. Like, we were horny during that time. It's the humanity, right? It's humanizing to acknowledge that was absolutely the scenario and the case.
QUADROS: I guess one thing that I was wondering about though, with your photos, obviously, like they're very closely cropped. There's not a lot of faces. How do you think about anonymity with the source material and your work?
MITCHELL: This is something that I'm still thinking about. I think a lot about other artists’ work like Lorna Simpson or Mickalene Thomas who go to the Ebony archive or the Jet archive. They include the faces of the women in their work. And I do think there is this reason to be specific or to outline that specificity within the archive to show the particular faces of the women that were there. I find that can be a way to humanize the subjects of that particular time or within that era through image making.
My work is about the women in the archive, and it's also about other things. So I think anonymity becomes this way of trying to speak to the other things that I'm interested in. I've played or toyed with the idea of faces, but for me, I think I'm interested in a kind of body politic and maybe that's the draw to then focus on the body, but it's something that I'm still figuring out.
QUADROS: Is there anything you think people fundamentally misunderstand about your work?
MITCHELL: Yeah. People are always like, “Why aren't you behind the camera?” And I'm like, “Girl, it's not about me.” I mean, it is, but it isn't. It's about the images.
There's this constant demand when you're dabbling in terms of this representation to make yourself fully legible, right? To make the subjects fully legible. I think that's why I'm pushing back against this use of the gaze or use of the face because there's this constant expectation that as a Black person, you have to show up in a way that's fully intelligible, oftentimes to a particular kind of white, patriarchal gaze. And in a way, I think this is maybe an exercise of refusal in that.
The initial hesitation with the work is because it's pornographic. Not to deny the way in which porn does contribute to fetish, contribute to particular kinds of understandings of racial ideologies or gendered ideologies. I think that's where the hesitation does potentially lie. But I don't think the answer is to continue to disregard it or to silence it.
QUADROS: Do you still take photos? Do you still have your own photography practice?
MITCHELL: I do still take photos. Actually for a public artwork that I did last year, I was behind the camera and I took a picture of myself. Because it was a public installation and it's like in Vancouver, BC, they rejected the work without a reason. It was just a proposal of my hand, satin, and some pearls, which was in reference to the archive. But they rejected it without the possibility of resubmitting.
It felt like a good decision on my part to implicate my own body in that process, rather than the images, because at least then it's a rejection of me. I made the decision to be behind the camera because then I have full control, in a way.
Then after the rejection, I was like, Would it have mattered if it was me or somebody else? I think just the idea of a body there for the sake of itself, is what people just didn't like, because it's a public work. I didn't look very different from any type of ad that uses sex to sell something, to be this capitalist thing. But as soon as it's reclaiming it as something else, it becomes a bit of an issue.
QUADROS: Wow. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that.
MITCHELL: It's okay. We still rose. We still did something. They're operating out of this fear that people are going to say things about the work, and they don't wanna deal with the backlash around that.
QUADROS: I don't know how it is in Canada, but now in America, you can't even make public art about Blackness or really any marginalized identity without fear of losing your funding.
MITCHELL: It's crazy that simple visibility is deemed as a threat. It was really eye-opening. I was like, “So this is where we're at.” And, mind you, this is the way that I navigate my day-to-day life. This is how I have to exist, how I have to navigate the world. And somehow in this deeming it as unacceptable – what do you have to say about me and like other people that look like me? What is being subtly suggested there?
