The Brooklyn Rail

A suggestion of violence pierces White Cube’s first-floor gallery. The room is sealed in squeaking silence and its white walls are lined with a steady pattern of black rectangular frames. But a small razor blade punctures the back wall at a sharp angle, inciting tension in the otherwise restrained environment.

PURE GAZE is Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York, featuring work from her ongoing series initiated in 2023, NEVER LET ME GO. McClodden’s razor blade is a suspenseful proposition that is as tantalizing and ambiguous as the series’ title, which reads as both a plea for connection and a severe command. But who is the speaker? How are they demanding to be held, and who is being addressed?

NEVER LET ME GO skirts the human figure to explore sculptural form, surface texture, and tension. The series references kinbaku-bi, a form of Japanese rope bondage that translates to “the beauty of tight binding.” In kinbaku-bi, rope is used to create aesthetic patterns across the submissive subject’s body while controlling their physical experience through constriction. McClodden echoes this practice by securing BDSM apparatus—steel rings, bamboo poles, and other suspension devices—to leather-clad frames using taut coils of jute rope.

Kinbaku-bi’s presence in contemporary art can be traced to the controversial photography of Nobuyoshi Araki, but McClodden’s approach has a markedly different tone. Rather than foregrounding eroticism through explicit imagery, her abstract works emphasize pressure and constraint. These dark-hued, austere monoliths invite close observation of their differing binding methods, embedded objects, and treated surfaces.

The series spotlights McClodden’s effort to prioritize aesthetic form over social meaning while evincing the inherent complications of doing so as a queer Black artist. Many of McClodden’s previous works overtly invoke Black figures, histories, and African diasporic spiritual practices, but NEVER LET ME GO focuses on exploring the compositional arrangement of materials within a frame. Still, the treated hide of her works elicits a strong anthropomorphized empathy for their visible affliction. The skins are scuffed, stretched, dented, dyed, and buffed with shoe polish: The blistered surface of NEVER LET ME GO | XXIII. Shinjuku moonlight (2025) traps pockets of air, while the leather dermis of NEVER LET ME GO | XXXIX. brutal ease (2025) appears forcefully scrubbed, leaving dark, matte streaks over a swath of deep brown, through which cadmium red dye emerges.

McClodden's leather figures bear traces of material manipulation while displaying tools of physical control. NEVER LET ME GO | XXXVII. stay ready (2025) contains a long rod with sharp dual prongs lining its spine. This steel apparatus extends diagonally from one end of the frame to the other, strapped tightly to the leather surface with interlocking ropes. Even without knowing the hook-lined device was once used for drying meat, its potential for corporeal violence is evident. Yet, instead of provoking gore, the object’s reminder of the body as flesh is made more unnerving by its clinical presentation.

Other works suggest processes that are at once hazardous and seductive. On the gallery’s second floor, NEVER LET ME GO | XLIV. the zenith (2025) hangs in stark cruciform. A thick bamboo rod is bound horizontally to a hide canvas bruised red and blue, braced by elegant and minimal ropework. NEVER LET ME GO | XXXI. petite fix (2025) holds a more slender bamboo pole in a web of ropes. These bamboo are used in kinbaku-bi suspension, an operation that requires technical mastery to manage risks of nerve compression, circulation loss, or asphyxiation. McClodden’s works thus summon coexisting binaries—submission and dominance, defenselessness and control, pain and pleasure—that are delicately negotiated between bodies in bondage and other interpersonal dynamics.

In her 2011 book The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson suggests that rather than asking whether evocations of cruelty in art reveal what the world is “really like,” more compelling questions are: “What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations or perceptions does it open in the body?” The tools of pleasure and subjugation in McClodden’s latest works engage these very questions, as the artist refuses visualizing or aestheticizing physical brutality in a world already desensitized by an overexposure to violent imagery.

Instead, NEVER LET ME GO holds viewers in the uneasy interstice between a tightly held breath and cathartic release. Standing within the dystopian, hermetic environment of bright lights amid McClodden’s works, one feels acutely aware of the boundaries between themselves and the vaguely disciplinary objects that surround them. This heightened state throws into sharp relief the contours of ourselves as fundamentally relational bodies—shaped by the vulnerabilities that we invite others to witness and the control we choose to relinquish.