In both his musical and visual practice, Damon Locks is a master of the sample.
In his solo show “We Are Our People,” currently on view at Goldfinch, Locks explores the method as the basis for mixed-media works that feel both pessimistic and urgent.
The show is comprised of nearly two dozen works made between 2022 and 2025. Much of the work is paper-based, with a few wood panels. The focus of most are faces. Faces of historical figures and actual people Locks has sampled (in many cases using a xerox machine) from a variety of archival sources including yearbooks and news images. Their visages are affixed to wood or collaged on paper and set, in most cases, against a busy backdrop of other illustrations both representational and abstract.
The faces have the aura of the familiar, their hairstyles and glasses bear traces of their age and era, but most have been manipulated by Locks in some way; their texture altered, portions of their faces obscured by other cutouts or, more often, graphic lines and patterns and shading in pen and pencil. Snapshots of the past are filtered through the visual noise of the present.
The work is resolutely material, the various forms and shapes of the paper are layered one on top of another, pulling the works off the page and transforming them in many cases into three-dimensions. Apart from the images and illustrations, most of the works also contain hand-written or type-written text. One work, “5 Principles” (2022), features the faces of five Black men. Only one is attached to a body that is dressed in martial arts attire and seemingly in mid-move. Fragments of other shapes and images, including a skull, fill the top portion of the paper, while the ostensible five principles, “Self-defence, power, mind, unity, and energy” are affixed in block-print text surrounding the figures. Warnings are interspersed with mantras “Look Out” appears in pencil on one side, while “I Can Do It” is typed and affixed to another.
In another series of work, Locks borrows the form of the comic strip, affixing longer, type-written text above and below cut-up graphic illustrations of Black folks gazing out toward the viewer. These are the most story-like of the show. “Her eyes smoke with intensity even as her smile remains gentle when she says goodbye,” reads the text beneath the image of a woman and man, pictured side by side, but seemingly unengaged with one another.
