By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
It’s not often that you see tattoo art on display in an art gallery, but a University of Massachusetts alum will soon change that with an upcoming exhibition.
Alex Leon Sherker’s art show “Who Are You? Who Am AI?” will be at the Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass Amherst from Friday, Oct. 3, through Friday, Oct. 31, with an opening reception on Friday, Oct. 3, from 5 to 7 p.m.
It’s not often that you see tattoo art on display in an art gallery, but a University of Massachusetts alum will soon change that with an upcoming exhibition. / COURTESY MADDIE FABIAN
Though tattooing is obviously a key part of the exhibition, Sherker’s focus is more about the philosophical concepts behind tattooing as a means of building and representing identity rather than getting “too caught in the tattoo-ness of the show.”
“Tattooing is more than just the standard concept of the images,” Sherker said. “It’s more than just hearts and daggers and dragons and panthers; it’s whole mythologies of life and the human journey.”
“In a world, especially right now, where we’re saturated by icon and image, and we are driven to define ourselves, usually through icon or image, or ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that,’ or just to display ourselves as an identity, tattooing is absolutely a big part of that conceptually,” he added. “A lot of people are seeking tattoos now who never used to, but also, the imagery of tattooing has shifted and, culturally, for millennia, tattoos have given us images of everyday life or subject matter that sort of defines the self.”
The exhibition features 18 large-scale prints of black-and-white lineart pieces, each nearly life-sized at 2-feet-by-5-feet, hung up in a circle. Sherker wants guests to “treat the gallery like a meditation space and to treat each piece as a station along a wheel of meditation,” standing in front of each one and reflecting on what parts of it they identify with as they move through the gallery.
“The whole show is about layers of irony, layers of meaning, double meanings, all of that, because life is complex; identity is complex,” Sherker said. / COURTESY ALEX LEON SHERKER
“My intention with that was to give people enough of an open ground to search for themselves in as possible,” he said.
The images themselves are often hybridized in ways that combine religion and pop culture – one work, for example, features an image combining Snoopy and Manjushri, a Bodhisattva representing wisdom in Buddhism.
“Almost everything in it is hybridized in some way,” he said, “because we are all hybrid creations of the identities that we choose and that we assume. … Everything is what it is and something else, because we are, so much.”
The spiritual connection to tattooing is important to Sherker, who has long identified with the “wizard” moniker. (His Instagram handle is @wizardmountain; his Facebook page asks, “Ever been tattooed by a Wizard? Do you want to be?”) Sherker’s friends started calling him “wizard” as a joke – he has a thick white beard and is a fan of mysticism and the occult – “and then it stuck,” he said, “and it made sense.” He started to delve into the question, “What does it mean to be a wizard?”
“Tattooing is more than just the standard concept of the images,” Sherker said. “It’s more than just hearts and daggers and dragons and panthers; it’s whole mythologies of life and the human journey.” / COURTESY ALEX LEON SHERKER
As it turns out, being a tattoo artist ended up turning him into something of a shamanic figure, as he saw it: both a tattooer and a shaman “connect people to who they are or to help suss out who they are, and that’s the same role as an artist – or a good artist, anyway – to be a medium and a sort of mystic and to figure out the connections between the seen and unseen, known and unknown.”
“Galleries are sacred spaces; artworks are sacred objects, either because we make it so or because the artist made it so,” he said. A tattoo “can just be a tattoo; it can just be a picture, or it can be a really meaningful life-pivoting icon or talisman.”
“As a tattooer or as an artist, we’re given the opportunity to fill that sacred role,” he continued. “Whether we choose to or not or whether we know it or not, that’s a separate matter. I think that, by extension, the people who seek tattoos are seeking something sacred, but may not know it. They may think, ‘I just want a picture to remember my grandma,’ but that’s a sacred thing, and identity and our concepts of identity and who we are, that’s a sacred endeavor to find the self.”
The AI connection (as hinted at in the title) isn’t because the work was created by artificial intelligence, but because the ever-evolving nature of AI has created “an added layer of trying to navigate identity in a world where there are so many new definitions of identity,” and because Sherker created his images by hand, but with the help of software.
“That’s another layer – the whole show is about layers of irony, layers of meaning, double meanings, all of that, because life is complex; identity is complex,” Sherker said.
Sherker now lives and works as a tattoo artist in Austin, Texas, but he graduated from UMass in the ’90s. As a student, the New Africa House (where the Augusta Savage Gallery is) played a role in his education: he took classes in the building, gave a poetry reading in the gallery itself, and studied sculpture in a classroom in the building’s basement.
“It really is an important full-circle thing for me to come back to the school that I love so much, come back to the area that I love so much, where so many things began for me,” he said. “So many pieces of my identity began there, and to be able to come back with an exhibition exploring identity feels like a wonderful full circle.”
Admission to the show is free.
