BmoreArt

At the show’s opening, Box explained the idea behind the exhibit’s physical arrangement, “The middle would be this meeting place between these two bodies of work, and there would be these streams of practice that would branch off.”  

Following the right branch takes one into “The INVISIBLE Archive,” made up of three sections of discrete styles corresponding to different time periods. These images highlight Box’s skillful technique—especially her exquisite appreciation of light—as well as her rapport with people often pushed to the margins, which enables her to document their lives and the places and spaces they inhabit. 

The earliest series, “The Shelter, The Street,” contains Box’s black-and-white photographs from 2005-2012 of unhoused queer youth connected to the emergency shelter Sylvia’s Place in New York City. In Baby, near Occupy Wall Street (Zuccotti Park), Baby stands centered in the frame, staring straight into the camera with the tiniest tilt of the head, caught mid-inhalation of a cigarette. The light is filtered through the black umbrella Baby holds, creating a frame against the out-of-focus background, almost a halo effect, but also highlighting in sharp detail the arch of an eyebrow, the teeth of a zipper, the charms on a bracelet. The photograph is a study in concentrated attention: Baby is peering steadily at us as much as we are looking at Baby.

While this series is imbued with a stillness and perhaps melancholy, Box’s next series “The Last Battle” (2010-2018) on the Kiki scene, the ballrooms and pageants for transgender and nonbinary youth, is bursting with bravado and kinetic energy. In Female figure performance, The HMI Awards Ball, two people are caught mid-ecstatic dance. Strands of hair fly wildly in the air as if being charged with an electric current, arms and legs splay at ungainly angles: they’re entirely wrapped up in their own worlds. The canted framing makes it look like the dancers are vogueing on a floor that is tilting downward to the left. While their features are mostly obscured, the light lands on individual upturned faces in the crowd, which emphasizes that the audience’s act of watching is also part of the performance.

People are entirely absent in the third series “The Village: Maps” (2018). Instead, Box manipulates images of maps and photos of locations seen in “The Shelter, The Street” series by scanning, inverting, and folding the printing paper to create washed-out street scenes in gray, black, and white. Here in these ghostly images is the attempt to depict the erasure of the queer community Box had originally documented and what the gallery notes describe as “the fleeting nature of the community itself.” 

Traversing the empty middle room to enter the “Caribbean Dreams” branch of Confluences requires at first a mental gear shift. Box’s studio-based practice that explores her ancestry and the intersectional identities of her diasporic Caribbean experience is more eclectic and layered than “The INVISIBLE Archive.” These color images are dense with references and signifiers, collages of material elements that speak to weighty matters of colonialism, exoticism, and commodification. The focus has moved from chosen family to Box’s own genealogy, the grounding in specific New York City sites to a trans-national sense of place, and from Box being outside the frame to the overt subject of the work. 

The series’ exploration of Box’s multi-stranded ancestry and the convergence of past with present immediately brings to mind Caribbean-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who described cultural identities as rooted in history but undergoing “constant trans-formation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power,” he once wrote. “Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”

Take, for instance, One Kind of Story, a digital collage centered around a pixelated self-portrait in which Box poses like a late nineteenth-century Trinidadian postcard image of “Young Indian Woman” made by French photographer Félix Morin. While we can’t really make out Box’s expression, we can see clearly the seven vintage photos of her mother, grandmother, great-aunt, and other maternal relatives that surround her. Box’s pose harkens back to modelling identity for an imperialist, male gaze, while their pictures offer a parallel history, that of a formidable family tree that binds these women across generations and diasporic dispersion.

Box deliberately plays on and subverts the Dutch still life tradition in Multiple #3. A table is laden with familiar motifs of scattered ripe fruits—a pomegranate broken open with seeds tumbling out—and a vase of white lilies. To which Box adds a shrink-wrapped starfruit still bearing a price tag from “Asian Food” and an empty rum bottle. Interspersed are also a couple vintage photos of young women who could be her relatives. A low-resolution blow-up of a landscape scene in black and white, which the exhibition notes tell us is “of colonial-era Trinidad by one of the country’s most acclaimed nineteenth-century painters, Michel-Jean Cazabon” serves as the backdrop. 

Hovering in the space between that background and the foregrounded table are two superimposed images of Box that face each other. The one in half-profile has her meeting the eye of the viewer; the other in full profile is positioned so Box is looking intently at herself, holding what appears, unsettlingly, to be a knife. Again, Box introduces elements that destabilize the idealized version of a colonial past and visibilizes women in the long tradition of commodification and export of Caribbean products and its people, including the flow of migrants that brought the artist to the Unites States as a child.

“When you reject the idea of ‘representation,’ you don’t have to say, what would I say?” Box declared at the gallery talk. Instead, she already knows “I want to say this, I want to make this,” because it is grounded in the reality of the multiple subjectivities that she and the communities she has documented actually live. 

As a musuem exhibition, Confluences succeeds as a whole at showcasing this confidence of purpose combined with Box’s willingness to evolve her approach to image-making over two decades to meet the challenges of conveying complexity. The artist’s inaugural exhibition in DC is also a timely reminder that insisting on seeing and being seen as our whole selves isn’t just good art, it’s an act of resistance. 

Samantha Box: Confluences is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts until March 23, 2025.