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December 10, 2024 – Review
Y. Malik Jalal’s “Break Neck Speeds”
Jenny Wu
Y. Malik Jalal’s steel sculptures serve as picture frames for his found photographs. Newspaper clippings, magazine covers, business cards, and screengrabs from traffic camera footage, once incorporated into the New Haven- and Atlanta-based artist’s somber color palette and subjected to his arrangements and juxtapositions, evoke an aesthetics of abjection, conjuring car accidents from which one cannot, despite one’s better judgment, look away.
In the wall-mounted assemblage WARP NO. 1 (all works 2024), a large print of the dented front bumper of a gray jalopy looms over a much smaller black-and-white photo of a veiled Princess Diana. In light of this juxtaposition, the high-speed collision that fatally injured the English royal in 1997 seems prefigured in her downcast eyes. Both images are set in a flat, steely-gray frame that, like the old car, appears scuffed, dusty, and dilapidated but not quite vintage—decommissioned but unable to rest. In WARP NO. 2, Jalal presents an image of a crash test dummy strapped in the backseat of a car. At the bottom right of the panel, positioned like addenda, are a grimy red lens cloth advertising Harrigan Inc., a Connecticut-based home and auto insurance agency, and a photo of an actor’s face covered in …