Tiona Nekkia McClodden makes work about dignity under pressure.
Not dignity as politeness, respectability, or social approval, but dignity as the right to determine the conditions under which a body, a history, or a presence becomes visible. Her work does not offer itself up easily. Not because it wants to be closed, but because it refuses the expectation that art — and especially Black queer presence — should be immediately legible, explainable, or emotionally available.
Her work asks for time. For physical proximity. For a way of looking that does not immediately try to possess what it sees.
In PURE GAZE, her exhibition at White Cube New York, McClodden presents a new development within her ongoing series NEVER LET ME GO. The title suggests closeness, perhaps even surrender, but in McClodden’s work holding is never simple. A grip can protect, but it can also restrict. Touch can carry desire, but also power. Intimacy can be tenderness, but it can also become pressure.
McClodden herself describes this as a “profane hold”: a pressure that moves beyond the desires and limits of human interaction. This phrase sits at the core of the exhibition. It is not only about bodies being held, but about the forces that act upon bodies: desire, discipline, history, spirituality, violence, eroticism, ritual, and the gaze of another.
The exhibition takes place within the white, institutional architecture of White Cube New York. That context is not neutral. The white cube has historically presented itself as a space where art can appear pure, detached from the world. McClodden brings into that space precisely what disturbs such purity: skin, pressure, rope, leather, shine, labour, sexuality, spirituality, and history.
Her works are installed with formal restraint, yet their materials seem to pull, swell, tighten, and breathe. The controlled presentation collides with the physical intensity of the work.
The works are made from leather, black jute rope, knots, bamboo, metal, shoe polish, dyes, and deep black frames. The leather is treated with Saphir shoe polish, dyed leather, and intense traces of colour. The ropes bind the surface, cross it, compress it, and create lines, marks, and scars. From a distance the works appear formal and abstract; up close they become bodily: surfaces under pressure, skins that do not open themselves up but carry traces.
Yet McClodden deliberately presents these works not as bodies, but as abstract figures. This distinction is crucial. The body has rarely been looked at neutrally in art history. Black, queer, and female bodies in particular have too often been read through projection, desire, classification, or control. By refusing the literal body and shifting it into the abstract figure, McClodden opens another possibility: presence without full availability.
This abstraction is not an escape from reality. On the contrary, it makes reality more sharply felt. A recognisable body would too quickly be categorised: identity, sexuality, vulnerability, trauma, desire. The abstract figure slows down that process. It carries tension without being reduced to a single narrative. It remains physical, but not fixed. Charged, but not fully exposed.
Here lies the value of McClodden’s work: dignity as the right not to be fully available.
Not as vagueness. Not as aesthetic mystery. But as autonomy.
McClodden shows that something can be visible without giving itself away completely. A figure can be present without becoming the property of the gaze. A history can be felt without being reduced to identity politics, trauma, or representation.
This dignity is not polite or detached. It emerges through material, labour, and tension. In PURE GAZE, nothing is smooth or casual. The leather shines, but not as luxury. The rope binds, but not as decoration. The knots refer to techniques of restraint, control, and eroticism, but also to attention, mastery, and bodily knowledge. McClodden uses restraint not simply as an image of oppression, but as a field in which power, surrender, consent, and transformation can be re-examined.
This makes her work more complex than a straightforward narrative of liberation from constraint. McClodden seeks freedom not outside pressure, but through an investigation of how freedom may be negotiated within tension, discipline, and limitation. In her artist statement, she writes that the abstract figure comes from a desire for “ways for more freedom to exist.” That freedom does not lie in total release, but in the capacity not to be fully fixed by what another thinks they see.
Her spiritual references deepen this further. McClodden’s relationship to Santería and the Orisha Shango brings another understanding of objects, bodies, and presence into the work. Objects are not dead matter. They carry forces, histories, rituals, and responsibilities. In earlier work, she has spoken of the need not only to talk about objects, but to speak to them. That attitude is palpable in PURE GAZE. These works do not feel merely made to be looked at; they seem to possess their own presence and internal pressure.
The title PURE GAZE therefore becomes almost uncomfortable. Can there be such a thing as a pure gaze? Can looking ever be innocent? Every gaze carries expectation, power, desire, and history. McClodden does not simply reject the gaze; she tests it. She asks the viewer not for quick identification, but for discipline.
Can you look without immediately trying to explain?
Can you take a form seriously without reducing it to body, symbol, or story?
Can you acknowledge presence without taking possession of it?
This is the contemporary urgency of her work. We live in a culture in which visibility is often treated as an unquestioned good. Everything must be shared, named, explained, and represented. But McClodden shows that visibility can also become pressure. Whoever is visible can also be fixed in place. Whoever is represented can be framed once again by the very gaze that claims to offer recognition.
That is why her work shifts the question from visibility to autonomy.
Not: may this body be seen?
But: under what conditions does it appear?
Who determines its meaning?
Where does attention end and appropriation begin?
Within Post-Colonial Gold, McClodden is connected to Dignity because her work shows that visibility alone is not enough. True dignity lies in the power to decide how, when, and under what conditions one becomes visible.
Elusiveness — the right to remain elusive — is not a withdrawal from the world in her work. It is a strategy for preserving dignity. Her figures are present, but not available on command. They carry traces of body, discipline, desire, and history, yet they refuse to be reduced to a direct message. They ask for looking without possession.
The value McClodden makes visible is ultimately dignity through elusiveness. She shows that something does not need to be fully legible in order to be powerfully present. At a time when everything is expected to be transparent, shareable, and explainable, McClodden defends the importance of complexity.
Not everything has to be accessible in order to have meaning.
Not everything has to be explained in order to be recognised.
Not every body, history, or form is available to the gaze of another.
This makes PURE GAZE not an exhibition about distance, but about precision. McClodden does not give the viewer less; she asks for more: more attention, more responsibility, more willingness to remain with what cannot be immediately resolved.
Her work makes visible that freedom is not only about appearing, but about holding the power to determine the conditions of one’s own visibility.
That is where dignity begins.
Value
Dignity — the right not to be fully available
Tiona Nekkia McClodden makes visible that dignity does not depend on full legibility. In her work, dignity is the right to be present without being consumed, explained, categorised, or fixed by the gaze of another.
Her abstract figures show that a body, identity, or history can remain partially withheld and still be powerfully present. This withholding is not absence. It is autonomy.
Contemporary urgency
McClodden’s work is urgent because she treats visibility not as an endpoint, but as a field of tension. At a time when representation is often celebrated, she asks a more difficult question: what happens when visibility becomes another form of control?
Her work reminds us that emancipation is not only about being seen, but also about the right not to be fully explained, consumed, or fixed by the gaze of another.
For Post-Colonial Gold, this is essential. The values we need again for a new generation are not only values of visibility, but also of boundaries, autonomy, inner strength, and dignity.
Sources
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, PURE GAZE, White Cube New York, 3 September – 18 October 2025. Artist statement for the series NEVER LET ME GO.
Exhibition review of PURE GAZE, discussing the installation at White Cube New York, McClodden’s use of materials, the reference to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube, her relationship to Santería, Shango, BDSM, kinbaku-bi, restraint, and the “profane hold.”
Biographical context: Tiona Nekkia McClodden, interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and curator, born in Blytheville, Arkansas, based in Philadelphia. Her practice explores gender, sexuality, race and Black queer lineage, and includes film, installation, performance, sculpture, archival research, and her project space Conceptual Fade.
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