Kevin Brisco Jr: Night Moves

1. 

Nyctophobia is the clinical term for an extreme fear of the dark. It comes from the Greek word for night, nyktos. Once I hear it, I can’t get it out of my mind. It sounds like the name of a faraway land, a realm suspended between the material and immaterial. I happen upon the word by accident, like slipping down the rabbit hole. Surprisingly, it felt comforting to fall, to be embraced by shadows. 

There are other terms that are used too, both officially and unofficially, for this particular anxiety, words that conjure a sense of the mythic and the profane and the aching. Scotophobia. Lygophobia. Achluophobia. The fear is common among children between ages 6 and 12, though it can linger through adolescence and adulthood. According to the Cleveland Clinic, triggers can include entering a movie theater, seeing the sun go down, turning out the lights, getting ready for bed. In severe cases, people with nyctophobia will avoid any situation where there isn’t adequate light. Researchers contend that nyctophobia has less to do with a fear of darkness itself, and more to do with a profound anxiety over what is hidden, unseen, elusive. 

As a kid, like most children, I found dark spaces to be full of unspoken terrors. For a long time, I couldn’t fall asleep without a light source—whether from a ceramic plug-in nightlight or from a glowing television set on mute. I dreaded having to get up during the middle of the night—the splotches of shadows that seemed to move, the potent stillness of the room, the inability to see clearly while seemingly being bombarded with other sensory information—all of it made me devolve into a puddle of quivering sweat. But it’s true. It wasn’t the dark itself, though, at the time, it became a convenient shorthand for my complex reactions. Nyktos reminded me that the darkness wasn’t the problem. I was troubled by what it held, all the indescribable energies, how they seemed to be swimming with possibilities that went beyond the limited understanding of myself and the world. A brush with the unknown. We’re taught to fear such encounters, to be weary of anything that falls outside of the constructed boundaries of what is normal and legible. 

I repeat the word in my head, a silent lullaby, savoring the click-clack sounds of the syllables, how these seem to bounce off each other, resistant and pliant at the same time. After a while, their rhythms begin to sound like an echoing heartbeat. Or the steady tap of footsteps approaching in the night. 

2. 

The children stand in a line, facing the threshold of an open door, their features swallowed up by the night. It wouldn’t be incorrect to describe their faces as blank, emptied out, a void. Simple details, like a mouth or a furrowed brow, are hard to make out clearly, if at all. One wears square glasses, her long box braids partially hidden by a yellow bandana tied snug over her head. Another claps his hands in front of him, his posture polite but stiff. His profile catches shards of a warm yellow light. The third child’s face is a pool of inky black, spilling outwards until it blends into their thick hair, erasing the lines between neck, chin, forehead. There is a fourth figure—an older woman, her back turned away from us. Her face isn’t a face at all. It’s a fragment, a portrait of the head as a black hole.

The one with the yellow bandana holds out her hand, waiting. We wait too, eager for a stray gesture that will unlock the mysteries of what we’re unable to parse. Instead, we are left to decipher the curves of shadows and the variations of darkness collected across their faces. I noticed things I didn’t before, when I skimmed the surface, certain the obscurity meant there was nothing to see. For instance, one child’s face is lit like the surface of a jagged crescent moon. And the way the shadows moved like restless beats upon their ginger-stained shirts. Unexpectedly, John Coltrane’s Blue Train (1958) comes to mind. The scene seems to conjure that album’s energetic merging of introspection and wild abandon. How different things feel under a moonless cool night. The longer I gazed into the other child’s pool visage, the surer I became that I was losing myself in a spiraling mirror, enraptured like Alice through the looking glass.  

Would Bring Me My Change (2022), a painting by Kevin Brisco Jr., trigger a nyctophobic? The only discernible light seems to come from the blue-tinged sky, which coats the Philly neighborhood in a twilit glow. The children don’t seem to mind, though. Despite what might be connoted by the blankness of their faces, each character radiates their own particular morphing heat, one that overwhelms the borders of the painting. In another scene, by another person, you could imagine this to be the prelude before the inevitable horror. In that same scene, one we have seen time and again, the voided faces of the strangers would be a harbinger, the stuff of nightmares. Here, the darkness gives language to the characters’ experiments in concealment and privacy. The void is a door, an opening that leads into a depthless realm. 

Perhaps that is what John Coltrane is looking at in the portrait used as the album cover for Blue Train. His image is washed in a bluish haze, similar to the one used in Bring Me My Change. Coltrane and the children are lost in their own reveries, allowing us to witness the variations of their interiority without fully allowing us access. As Glenn Lignon writes, “What does it mean, then, to try not to move at all, not to speak, for a body to be unreadable? Stillness and interiority can function as a critical stance, a kind of resistance.”^[1]

3. 

In an interview with artREAL, Brisco Jr. mentions working as a lighting technician in the film industry.^[2] His paintings double as cinematic stills, capturing ambiguous moments that invite the viewer into a deeper participation. Bring Me My Change interpolates a scene from Nina Menkes’s 1991 independent film Queen of Diamonds, which centers on Firdas, an alienated blackjack dealer living in Las Vegas. Catherine Damman writes in Bomb Magazine that, “[c]ritics have oft noted that Menkes moves Firdaus—who might elsewhere be a background character—to the fore.”^[3] Brisco Jr. enacts a similar movement with the paintings in Footsteps in the Dark. His work hovers on the moments that might be dismissed as background noise: a woman ordering a drink at the bar, a family huddling together in the kitchen, flowers by the window. We seem to arrive just before and after an action has taken place. Moreover, our sense of understanding is confused by the dim lighting, which transforms mundane scenes into ever-shifting psychological portraits. 

Claiming a suspicion towards “the Renaissance conception of light as an axiomatic truth,” Brisco Jr. explores the possibilities afforded by the lack of light. We are told (via art, literature, religion) lightness is something to aspire towards. That it is synonymous with purity, divinity, wisdom, and honesty. Under these terms it seems reasonable to fear the dark as a wily antagonist. Brisco Jr. dispenses with these outmoded binaries. For him, low lighting opens up other ways of relating, forcing us out of preconceived notions around how to act and how to perceive. Other senses become heightened, allowing us to experience the world anew. His approach is partially animated by the poetics of opacity, a term coined by Martinican philosopher and poet Éduoard Glissant. Opacity is a strategy against surveillance, a way of thwarting the colonial impulse to categorize, subjugate, and own. For Glissant, the right to opacity meant the right to be obscure, unreadable, muddled. Opacity offers an alternative mode, disrupting the usual conversations around visibility and representation. 

Brisco Jr. also cites David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue as another influential spark on his thoughts around the meanings of a lack of light. For his 2002 installation at Ace Gallery in New York, visitors were given pressure-activated LED flashlights at the entrance before being ushered into a 25 thousand square foot space completely enveloped in darkness. Visitors were expecting prints or sculptures. Instead, they found empty walls, an exhibition of nothingness. Their flashlights provided the only illumination—dots of blue light that transformed the visitors into works of movable art, as they cast their shadows onto the walls. The blue light didn’t last long, and visitors would be plunged back into darkness. It became an improvised song, as people found new ways to interact with each other. They were forced to rely on other modes of communication, cut off from the shorthand meanings that visibility can provide. Instead of conceptualizing darkness as fear-inducing, Hammons considered the generative qualities of low light, attuned to the rich histories evoked by the color black.

4. 

Although visibility and representation provide necessary strategies, an overreliance on these terms can lead to an impasse defined by a fixity that is easily reproducible. In a discussion on photography, media artist Shikeith reminds that “the medium also lends itself to other possibilities outside of these direct representations to something that’s more abstract and happening beneath what we see.”^[4] The use of black and blue, by Hammons and Brisco Jr., evokes the forces of abstraction and interiority. The absence of illumination facilitates wayward connections that may be impossible to reach in the dead of light. Like the visitors who journeyed through Concerto in Black and Blue, we must huddle together and cross wires in order to make meanings, harmonizing in ways that upend our commodified definitions of being and seeing. 

Cloaking the portrait in shadows, making his figures look away from us, delighting in the dimensions of blackness, Brisco Jr. turns figuration upside down, dwelling in the crevices and nooks that are often discarded. Vertigo (2022) depicts a bustling bartime scene bathed in neon amaranthine and ruby-jeweled tones. A woman in a knee-length coat with fur embellishments is framed by two barflies, each of their bodies a blur of movement. The woman, her hair collected into a high braided ponytail, doesn’t face us. It’s hard to know what she’s doing. Is she waiting for the bartender? Looking down at her drink? Texting? Distracted by a daydream? The dark holds all these possibilities and none of them. What’s certain is that the woman refuses the demands of visibility, dwelling within her own private space.