Rikkí Wright at Rift Contemporary

Rikkí Wright, Waiting (2023). Cyanotype monoprint on fabric, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

At the opening for Kind of Blue, Rikkí Wright’s solo exhibition at Rift Contemporary, fish tanks were placed around the gallery, filled with silt that obscured their contents. When I arrived, the dust had settled, revealing fragmented ceramic figures lying at the bottom of each aquarium, algae already growing over the brown clay. Along the gallery walls, Wright’s life-size cyanotypes continued the underwater theme. Imprints of the artist’s body floated across each blue expanse—in one, she curls into the fetal position, while in another, her pose appears protective, her arms raised against an unseen attacker. These works use rich natural substances—soil sourced from Wright’s family farm in Alabama, water, and sunlight—to engage with the past, exploring the slippery complexity of both familial memories and deeper ancestral histories related to the deadly Middle Passage. Across media, each work conjures a prior, often fraught encounter between the body and its environment, resulting in hazy, incomplete images that both obscure and illuminate the past.

Wright’s fish tank installations employ water and clay within confined, diorama-like spaces to explore the complexities of history and violence. In Leaning and Depending Sculpture (2022), a headless body bends backward at the waist, its knees resting on the sand at the bottom of a tall, hexagonal fish tank. The anguished figure looks rusted or charred, calling to mind imagery of shipwrecks and captives thrown overboard. In an adjacent tank, a pair of lips adorns a ceramic carafe, the vessel’s handle a curved, thick chain (Girlah, 2022). The chain and facial features imply the violent collision of people and objects, an encounter that now manifests as a ruin. The pain staged in Wright’s scenes, though, is contained within the small space of the aquariums, emphasizing the difficulty in rendering ancestral histories in ways that capture the past’s full scope. 

Wright’s cyanotypes use the obscuring effects of the printing process to represent the body. In And Caught Myself (2022), Wright’s body is rendered as a white shape emerging from a blue, oceanic background. Her pose seems fearful and defensive: She holds her hands above her head like a shield, legs bent to a crouch. Physical discomfort often accompanies Wright’s attempts to represent herself; “Slipped up” (2023) captures the artist mid-fall, her body surrounded by handprints. In Barbie Dreams (2023), however, the gestures are more ambiguous: Two floating dolls trail each other, nearly embracing. These cyanotypes suggest a spectrum of human dramas and histories, but foreclose the viewer from accessing their specifics. Across the gallery’s walls, huddled bodies—and the experiences their postures gesture toward—begin to disappear, an effect that will only grow more pronounced with age.

Of all the materials in Kind of Blue, the most important might be the simplest: time. In Wright’s absence, these artworks continue to morph. A cleaning fish flits around one fish tank; a snail crawls across another’s glass wall. Algae grow, cyanotypes vanish. Their changing character is an apt metaphor for memory’s persistence—and its ability to take new forms with every passing generation. Wright’s scenes conjure vanished histories through their precise use of natural materials: each ceramic, fish tank, and cyanotype acts as an imperfect conduit to a distant, multifaceted past. 

Rikkí Wright: Kind of Blue runs from January 6–February 17, 2024 at Rift Contemporary (2122 Berkeley Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90026).

Rikkí Wright, Kind of Blue (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Waiting #2 (2023). Cyanotype monoprint on fabric, 60 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Girlah (2022). Glazed stoneware, 3 x 5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Kind of Blue (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Leaning and Depending Sculpture (2022). Glazed stoneware, 11 x 10 x 10 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Barbie Dreams (2023). Cyanotype monoprint on fabric, 27 x 17 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Auntie Vase #7 (2022). Glazed stoneware, 13 x 4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Kind of Blue (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Rikkí Wright, Untitled (2022). Cyanotype monoprint on fabric, 75 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Rift Contemporary.

Claudia Ross is a writer from Los Angeles. Her fiction and arts criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, The Baffler, VICE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She is a regular contributor at ArtReview and Frieze.

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