Karice Mitchell
Sensation (Diptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass
“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. Read more.
