Wash N Set, 2019 a neon sculpture by Tschabalala Self foregrounds the artist's exploration into the cultural expectations placed upon the gendered and racialised body. Through her use of form and function, Self parses the iconographic significance of the black female body in contemporary culture. The emotional, physical and psychological implications of the playful portrait of a woman's head gives way to existential concerns. As with Self's paintings, there exists a tension between foreground and background that mirrors the character’s position in the larger social context. The repeated silhouette emerges and disintegrates into the pictorial plane, the politics of identity jump to the surface. Shown in unison, the character creates a community and holds space for varied
iterations of a shared experience.

“Harlem-born artist Tschabalala Self possesses the rare quality of being keenly sensitive to the impact of environment and the way it shapes human social behavior. Self creates and positions black figures to serve as a decoding device of circumstance, allowing each individual perspective to speak to the community from which it has derived. Her empathetic and intel-lectual density guides the creation of a black universe assembled with great distance from white ideology.”

- Sasha Bonét