Grant Wahlquist, owner of the namesake gallery in City Center, calls his current show of Christie Neptune’s work (“En Route to El Dorado: Deepened Relations and The Descent Back Home,” through Oct. 29) “hyper-culturally specific.” This is true. Which is to say that unless you are familiar with Guyanese history, much of it might leave you mystified.

But what is interesting about this work is that while, yes, there are certain images that remain beyond my ken and did not resonate with me, other images transcend the cultural specificity to convey larger messages with which I did and do identify.

Neptune is originally from Guyana, on South America’s northern coast. According to her own website’s explanation of the show, the country was a “single-production plantation economy of sugar” until the discovery of gold in the mid-1800s. This discovery marked the shift toward what she terms “Modern Guyanese” culture, a hybridized identity that swirled together Amerindians, formerly enslaved Africans and indentured South Asians.

“For the ‘Modern Guyanese,’ ” Neptune writes, “wealth is a cultural performance activated through the presence of gold.” For me, “Drapery and Plants in Grandma’s Living Room” strongly conveys this message in a way I can directly relate to my own Caribbean heritage. The large chromogenic print shows a sofa upholstered in a fabric patterned with gold acanthus leaves (a reference to classical – meaning Greek and Roman – antiquity), a shimmery gold throw and an ottoman with a silky gold stripe and wide gold bullion fringe.

In my parents’ pre-Castro Cuba, the upper classes took pride in tracing their histories back to Spain, even as they celebrated their independence from its colonial tyranny. Their homes were decorated not with furniture that would seem practical in a tropical environment, such as linen-attired sofas, but with silks, damasks and furniture in the Louis XIV and XVI styles.

It’s a strange dichotomy – the mix of pride in Cuban independence and the simultaneous dependence on European ties that legitimize a white upper class. Where there is an upper class, of course, there are also middle and lower classes. We surely don’t need to ponder very hard to divine who gets relegated to that bottom rung.

So, for both Neptune and me, this gilded sort of design was a kind of culture performance that signaled aristocratic membership, wealth and status. Implicit in this, of course, Neptune is interrogating the concepts of cultural, national and racial identity – identities that the possession of gold invariably have blurred in the modern era.

Paradoxically, some of the plants around the sofa have brown and dying leaves or sit in cheap plastic water-catching dishes, which might reference the tropical environment and its natural (meaning free of human constructs of grandeur) cycles of life and death. Or they might be stand-ins for our attempt to impose human hegemony on the natural world. Whatever the purpose, the contrast between what’s natural and real and what is human grandiosity and presumption (starting with the notion of gold conferring value) is palpable.

Conversely, it was harder to read the deeper meanings of a work like “Lavender and Blue” until I researched Guyanese culture and rituals after seeing the show. We can certainly admire this photograph for its lush composition and print quality. But we would not necessarily pick up, for example, that the blue of the title is indigo water, which is used along with the lavender of the picture in ritualistic baths that are believed to have any number of salutatory effects: good luck, warding off illness, etc.

Nor would we be able to intuit the importance of indigo in the Caribbean and American slave trade. During a 2011 podcast, Katherine McKinley, author of “Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World,” told NPR host Michel Martin, “Indigo was more powerful than the gun. It was used literally as currency. They were trading one length of cloth, in exchange for one human body.” Indigo was a crop that enslaved peoples were forced to seed, farm and harvest on American plantations, and it is irrevocably tied to denim, which was referred to on those plantations as “Negro cloth.”

Of course, this still life also contains gold bullion and Guyanese gold dust that has spilled from an African wood-and-horn-inlay spoon. I don’t mean to encourage didactic readings of every work here. But some knowledge of Guyanese culture can lend more depth beyond the formal and aesthetic properties of the work.

There are two self-portraits in the show that likewise have a formalistic beauty borrowed from European traditions but are also inflected with Neptune’s very personal cultural references. “Rosie’s Great Grandchild at Thirty-Three” is a profile shot in which she wears a gold necklace and gold grape earrings (grapes being a West Indian symbol of ancestry). In “A Guild of Light Shining Bright,” Neptune sports the grape earrings again, but also a black spot on her forehead, the kala tika, which is a West Indian adornment believed to ward off evil.

Both images reference European Renaissance portraiture (think Ghirlandaio, Pollaiuolo and Filippo Lippi), though we could just as easily reach back into the art of Egypt or Ethiopia for similar precedents. It is the details, including what looks like a cotton muslin dress worn by Neptune in “Guild,” that seem to hold alternate meanings.

Photos of family relatives that are printed onto mirrors bring in another element: the viewer. Unless we look at “Rosie” and “The Elders” from the side, it’s impossible not to appear as a kind of Zelig in Neptune’s past. This device encourages us to examine what possible roles our own attitudes and ancestry might have played in relation to the history of Guyana and, by extension, the complex tangle of colonialism, race, exploitation and cultural and economic supremacy that we continue to struggle with today.

In these works, it is unnecessary to know much at all about Guyanese culture or the origin stories of particular subjects (though we can easily figure out that Rosie is Neptune’s great grandmother based on her position right next to “Rosie’s Great Grandchild at Thirty-Three”). What we do intuit in both cases is the resilience of the Black or brown people in the photographs, their unapologetic, dead-on gaze unaffected by the reactions we see ourselves having in the mirror.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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