Like Father

Working with the expansive, minimalist spaces at Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea for two concurrent shows was a rather intuitive endeavor for Steve McQueen, despite his background in cinema’s generally narrative- and figurative-driven format. 

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Earlier this month, McQueen opened an untitled exhibition at Dia Chelsea, which is centered on a two-channel video titled Sunshine State, 2022, in which abstraction meets emotionally poignant narration. This piece is the first for McQueen, 54, in which he inserted his own voice as the narrator—appropriately so, as the script relays a deeply personal autobiographical anecdote that the artist’s father shared with him shortly before his death. “Who else could tell the story but him?” says Dia Art Foundation curator De Salvo. “It does add another level of vulnerability.”

The story that McQueen retells is one from his father’s youth as a migrant farm worker in Florida, where he had had a brush with death after entering a “whites only” bar with two Jamaican acquaintances. As to why the senior McQueen had kept this life-altering event from his son for nearly all of their time together, the artist expresses ambivalence—but he eventually comes to accept how the harrowing tale represented “fragility of life for him as a Black man,” and that his father had in fact been trying to protect him, holding him “tight.”

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Along with the personal throughline, Sunshine State pulls straight from film history as it takes up the climactic sequence from The Jazz Singer, 1927, the first “talkie.” In the scene appropriated by McQueen, the titular protagonist, played by Al Jolson, prepares for the dress rehearsal of his Broadway debut despite the knowledge that his father, a cantor at a synagogue who disowned his son years earlier for pursuing a stage career, has fallen deathly ill. As he gets ready backstage, viewers watch as the white actor transforms his appearance with blackface.

In McQueen’s edit, as the singer applies his makeup, his head and hands become invisible, and he’s reduced to a walking, swaying suit for the duration of the excerpt. Between the two screens on view side by side at Dia Chelsea, one channel is rendered in its negative as the film plays forward, with the added effect of the white cast appearing dark-skinned. The adjacent channel plays the same segment backwards, in the original grayscale. Within Sunshine State, the Jazz Singer sequence is broken up by an interlude showing only the sun, with the graphic close up enough to see the fiery texture of its surface, and we briefly hear the director whispering in frantic repetition: “Shine down on me, sunshine state, shine down on me.” 

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In the original film, as his father passes away, Jolson’s character takes his place as their synagogue’s cantor. It’s then revealed that he’s still able to fulfill his Broadway dreams after all, without sacrificing his familial obligation to follow in his father’s footsteps. It would seem that the world-renowned McQueen, with accolades across film and fine art, has managed to fulfill his creative aspirations, too. Yet that doesn’t mean that the grim realities experienced by one’s forebears are any less heart-wrenching when looked at head on.

In this way, McQueen has broken down the constituent parts of this film and manipulated it to emphasize or collapse the narrative. “He talks about himself as an artist who makes film,” says De Salvo, who previously worked with McQueen on a 2016 show at The Whitney. “He’s an artist who sculpts with light and sound.”

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For the concurrent untitled show at Dia Beacon, this manifests in a more conceptual manner, with a massive sound- and light-scape across the institution’s windowless lower level. As visitors descend into the 30,000 square-foot gallery, they become immersed in the sensations of the color spectrum as well as the hum of bass instruments. In a way, it’s the most abstracted version of the cinema one could arrive at: pure light and noise. The contrast between the two installations at either of the institution’s locations is how they are similar, as subjective, first-person experiences of the viewer blur into the vision of the maker. 

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Steve McQueen’s Dia Chelsea exhibition is on view until summer 2025 at 537 W 22nd St, New York, NY, and McQueen’s Dia Beacon installation on view until May 26, 2025 at 3 Beekman St, Beacon, NY.

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