Organized by: Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Native Memphian Roger Allan Cleaves is a painter and writer whose current work centers on Forget Me Nots Land, a fictional multiverse of his own creation. Launched by the artist in 2017, the Forget Me Nots Land series is a complex Afrofuturist fantasy that purposefully resists easy explanations and simple summaries. A World on Fire is the most recent chapter of this ongoing epic narrative. Cleaves’s colorful, abstract, and distorted figures and landscapes synthesize influences from the history of modernism including Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, with the aesthetics of collage and comics. By borrowing and reconfiguring aspects of famous art movements, he has developed a visual language that allows him to investigate and challenge the relationships between Black artists and contemporary art institutions. Furthermore, as in many examples of world-building from the rich history of science-fiction, Forget Me Nots Land exists in parallel to our own contemporary world, and thus becomes a place for the consideration of current social and cultural concerns.

In this chapter, Cleaves explores community, immigration, and celebratory rituals. A World on Fire centers around a biannual festival that begins when the weather changes the landscape of Forget Me Nots Land to a brilliantly colored place of oranges and golden yellows. This year, prospective new transplants to Forget Me Nots Land travel long distances from other realms of existence to participate in the fun. At the end of these celebrations, the natural world typically returns to its normal color, but this year, it is left inexplicably grey. The citizens of Forget Me Nots Land can only look back wistfully on what used to be, while the main protagonist, Bookie, sets out on a quest in hopes of restoring color to the world.