Author: Sarah Rose Sharp Page 4 of 6

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“Surrealism: The Conjured Life” @ MCA Chicago

On March 13, 2016

Stop Making Sense at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

“Surrealism: A Conjured Life” installation view All Images Courtesy of Sarah Rose Sharp

There is a fairly structured approach to cognitive development within our society—we try to make order of chaos. We assigned meanings to symbols (like letters or shapes), and organize those symbols in configurations that generate more complex meanings (like words or images), and continue along, stringing together ever-greater numbers of shapes and letters to make cogent arguments and beautiful imagery. We (hopefully) teach our young people fluency with the existing sets of shapes and letters, so they can grow up to understand all the meaning that has come before, and potentially contribute thoughts of their own to the collective understanding.

Unless we don’t. The Surrealist movement, which formally emerged in Paris in the mid-1920s, supplanted the basic order of established meaning, challenging straight-line association and favoring experimentation across a wide range of media, including theater, writing, film, poetry, and of course, visual art. A survey of foundational and second-generation Surrealist art from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) collection provides a vivid showcase of some of the lesser-known founders of Surrealism and those that followed in their footsteps—including a number of Chicago-based contemporary artists—and underscores the difficulty inherent in making work that disrupts the basic building blocks of meaning, as they are instilled in most of us from a young age. The work on display includes sculpture, paintings, drawings, and multi-media installations, and a wild array of subjects, rife with texture and symbols. Paradoxically, the exhibition materials provided by MCA immediately attempt to contextualize and categorize some of the symbols, themes, and motifs commonly explored by Surrealists—including death, winged messengers, sleep and dreams, the grotesque, mannequins and dolls, and phantasmagoria—which to some degree undermines the destabilizing objectives of Surrealism as a movement. Again, being nonsensical, generating and/or accepting ambiguous meaning in art, is harder than it initially seems.

Harry Bertoia, Landscape Fantasy (n.d.), Lead, wire, and stone slab

The gallery is organized into two spaces, an inner circle with rich purple walls that displays some of the movement’s foundational contributors, such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, and Remedios Varo. There are some outstanding works here, each radically different from the next – the aesthetics of Surrealism are as disparate and personal as the individuals who worked within the movement. Landscape Fantasy (n.d.) by Harry Bertoia is a delicate collection of lead and wire constructions, resembling a flea circus-like playscape, on a stone slab. This minimal and understated work sits just adjacent to Punching General (1969) by Enrico Baj—an cartoonishly-shaped and upholstered military figure on a spring, designed, presumably, to act as a sparring partner for the expression of animosity toward the military state. Within a nearby patch of wall is a four-part installation by Doris Salcedo; Atrabiliarios (1993) encases shoes recovered from victims of mass violence in wall niches, stitching them in behind semi-opaque membranes that give them an otherworldly quality.

Marcos, Raya, Night Nurse (1993/96), Installation view

Things are no less esoteric and trippy in the outer ring, which highlights Chicago-based artists that were influenced by the Surrealist movement. An entire wall is devoted to Marcos Raya’s disturbing installation Night Nurse (1993/96), which feels as though one of Frida Kahlo’s medical forensic paintings jumped its frame to become a department store window display. Paintings on Plexiglass suggest internal organs, literally hidden levels of processing, and highly textured paintings pile on revelations in the opposite direction—Surrealists were seemingly obsessed with abstracted notions of the body’s inner workings. The Rascette (1961) by H.C. Westermann, attempts to highlight the secret information encoded in our very palms. A freestanding display presents a two-sided work by Henry Darger—Chicago’s much posthumously celebrated outsider artist, who spent his professional life as a hospital custodian, all the while working on an longform manuscript peppered with illustrations of kewpiesque children in various fantasy states, that is equally disturbing as it is inspired.

H.C. Westermann, The Rascette (1961), Painted woo

Enrico Baj, Punching General (1969), Vinyl, metal, cloth, ribbon, foam,

Many contemporary artists in various media have used transcendental meditation as a method for discovering new perspectives and inspiration, and some of them—for example, filmmaker David Lynch—create work that is among the most challenging, dislocating, and original, in a field dominated by sloppy exposition and audience hand-holding. “Surrealism: The Conjured Life” presents a critical mass of work that collectively instigates a kind of dream state—surrounded by so much disordered thought, the viewer cannot help but surrender, at least temporarily, and cease to impose logic upon what she sees.

For some, this may prove to be an extremely alienating experience, but for this reviewer, it is a welcome respite from the cultural spoon-feeding that is the hallmark of our media age, designed to sell consumer products, above all else. Any one of the works in the exhibition would be worthy of longer consideration, but the best effect of all is the collective disorientation. It is a very different kind of shock and awe than the political and media process used to handily to inspire fear and division among the populace; it is a confusion that inspires wondering, and with it, transcendence.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois https://mcachicago.org/Home

Cosmologies @ CCS Center Gallery

By Sarah Rose Sharp

On February 27, 2016

In Installation, Paintings, Sculpture

Making Inner Space of Outer Space

Cosmologies, Installation view – All Images Courtesy of Sarah Rose Sharp

Aesthetically, the three-person show Cosmologies, which opened at the CCS Center Galleries on January 23^rd and runs through the 27^th of this month, reminds me very much of a Hubble telescope picture series of a formation called formation called Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula—a star-forming region. Works by New York-based painter Assunta Sera draw directly from celestial events to create abstracted landscapes—or more accurately ‘spacescapes?’—and a full wall installation of spills of glass by Kim Harty touches down onto the floor, unavoidably suggesting the Milky Way, by association. These groups of (mostly) hanging pieces provide a lovely backdrop to four freestanding sculptural works by Detroit’s own Robert Sestok, which take pride of position in the center of the gallery. Using anodized aluminum gives a refined, gold cast to Sestok’s sculptures, more usually roughly rendered in crude iron scrap material, and creates a sense of weightlessness around the crumpled aluminum pillars—large-scale balls of metal stacked into well-balanced totem poles.

Assunta Sera, Fragments Near and Far, 2015, Oil on canvas

The effect is quite lovely; it is worthwhile to avail oneself of a bench that accommodates time to sit and let the space hang around the viewer. The work is not particularly confrontational, but aside from the seeming tableau of outer space, there are deeper connections at play. Sera’s rejection of the straightforward recto-linear canvas shape in favor of irregular trapezoids and indented triangles is very much in keeping with one of the foundational principles of painting in the Cass Corridor school, in which Sestok is rooted.

Kim Harty, Spill, 2016, Hot cast glass and baking soda

Similarly, Harty’s consideration of spills—for each piece of the installation is a frozen puddle of milky glass, arranged into a snaking pathway across the wall and floor—is dealing with incidental moments and commonplace events. Another tenant of the Cass Corridor school was the principle of dealing with materials immediate and available, and these spills, especially with their vague allusion to bodily or cleaning fluids, are an ultimate example of omnipresent daily reality. While the interplay of concepts and aesthetics can sometimes lead to friction, these objects and paintings coexist peacefully, forming a positive ambient space. Taken on their own, or set in another context, each individual body of work could have a different set of associations, but set together, they form a seamless environment.

Robert Sestok, Anodized Aluminum Sculpture – installation view

“I didn’t start out trying to make a pretty show,” says CCS curator Michelle Perron, in an interview at the Cass Cafe. “The exhibit began with a longstanding interest in Assunta Sera’s paintings, since the 1980s, when I worked at the Michigan Gallery.” An encounter with Sera at a recent CCS grad event triggered a conversation that built into the seed for a show, and a studio visit to review Sestok’s newest “fantastic” body of work brought that seed into sprout. When Harty came on as head of CCS’s glass department, Perron found a previously untapped appreciation for glass as a medium. “Normally you could not get me anywhere near it,” she said. Harty’s full-wall installation draws the whole exhibit together, bringing the show into bloom.

That this serendipitous combination of very different artists has created such lovely celestial synchronicity seems appropriate, given the show’s theme. Perron declares that she had never seen the “Pillars of Creation” before I mentioned it, and the face that a reasonable facsimile has manifested within the CCS Center Galleries seems to me evidence of a higher order in the universe. While Perron demurs to embrace such New-Age association, as a native Californian, I am entirely comfortable characterizing this group show as deeply cosmic.

http://www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu/community-outreach-and-engagement/center-galleries

Indigenous Beauty & Invisible Conflict @ the Toledo Museum of Art

By Sarah Rose Sharp

On February 15, 2016

In Ceramic, Textile, Uncategorized

Charles & Valerie Diker (left) – TMA Director Brian P. Kennedy All Images Courtesy of Sarah Rose Sharp

This month, the Toledo Museum of Art opened the fourth and final installation on the tour of Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection. The show features a breathtaking array of cultural artifacts and several contemporary works of Native American art, collecting material culture from tribes that spanned the North American continent. Charles and Valerie Diker, who were approached by the American Federation of the Arts to create this exhibition, were on hand for the opening and to present a Master Series Lecture at TMA on Thursday, February 11. Their relationship with fine art collecting began with modern art, and having been drawn to Taos, New Mexico, they found similar points of resonance in Native arts. They describe their interest as aesthetic-driven, choosing to seek out and present survey of the most virtuosic examples of work by members of many different tribes and regions, rather than specializing in a particular area.

Some of the highly decorated garments in the Plateau & Plains region.

And virtuosic, they are. The Dikers concern themselves only with masterworks in their collection, and each piece represents skill, generational knowledge, and many hours of labor-intensive handwork. The exhibit is clustered by territory, giving one a sense of regional areas of expertise—pottery and Katsina figurines from the Southwest, wooden masks and tusk-carvings from the Western Arctic, basket-making in the Great Basin and California area. In the plateau and plains region, there is a great deal of detailed clothing, and tucked in the furthest reach of the exhibition, some breathtaking renderings of battle memories—the Great Plains area being the place where the West was truly won, or lost, depending on your perspective.

A decorated deerskin hide from the Plateau & Plains region.

That perspective is perhaps somewhat lacking, when it comes to this presentation. While the Dikers’ attraction to beautiful objects and their 40-year efforts to amass them is quite understandable, the show’s focus on beauty seems vaguely tone-deaf in light of the brutal history and continuing struggle for recognition associated with the early citizens of America—a process rooted in a similar kind of acquisition-based approach to native property. While the Dikers acknowledge this art as representative of “the first Americans,” and state that the intention of sharing their collection is to educate, there is also a sense that the concept of indigenous Americans as fully actualized and deeply expressive people (rather than cowboy-versus-Indian caricatures) is something of a revelation, in and of itself.

Guest Curator David Penney offers opening remarks at the media preview for Indigenous Beauty

Or, as stated by guest curator David Penney—one of the country’s leading scholarly thinkers and art historians in the field in American Indian art, and Associate Director of Museum Scholarship at National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.—in a brief one-on-one interview during TMA’s media preview, “American Indian culture is often thought of as something long ago, far away—an almost fairyland American Indian. It’s big in American imagination. In a sense, Americans invented American Indians that never existed. And so, those are the kinds of images that casual visitors to museums—through no fault of their own—bring to exhibitions like this. So I think it’s important to try to reconnect them to American history and [challenge] this idea that American Indian culture vanished or disappeared. That was a prediction made in the 19^th century, and it’s still not true. It never was true.”

Perhaps this need to educate at the baseline is real. It is certainly worth acknowledging that there is a prevailing and biased narrative around American history, and the questioning of that narrative is an absolutely necessary precursor to change. Despite a dawning cultural awareness that holidays like Columbus Day go beyond exceedingly poor taste, there are plenty of people who guilelessly celebrate Thanksgiving as a building block of our nation (or are just happy for a day off work). Perhaps it would indeed surprise these people to consider that the skill, soul, and care invested in these cultural artifacts are a reflection of the thriving culture that very much plays a part in the shape of modern-day America. Certainly in a place like Toledo, Ohio, there is a preponderance of artists and craftspeople who can relate to the exquisite handwork of carving, beading, vessel-building, garment-making, and weaving that elevates these objects. As Charles Diker said, in his opening remarks, “There was no word for “art” among these (native) languages, it permeated every aspect of life.”

Southwestern pottery and Katsina dolls

In the same way that art and daily living were intertwined within the cultures that produced these artifacts, it is difficult for me to contemplate their beauty without also feeling a resounding sense of loss—for the people that were killed, relocated, and stripped of their heritage; for the artistic voices that were silenced or lost in the shuffle; and for contemporary society, being shaped by the inability of the colonists to envision an America that embraced and incorporated their predecessors. I can find no fault with the objects on display, and the question of their inclusion in the art canon is inarguable. If the garments standing empty on wire frames seem to imply a kind of absence, perhaps that is all for the better. Art and beauty can be, as is so often the case, the jumping off point for more a serious process of reconciling the pain in which all of us, as Americans, are complicit.

Toledo Museum of Art – http://www.toledomuseum.org/

Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection – February 12 – May 8, 2016

Coleman, Gardner, & Egner @ N’Namdi Contemporary

By Sarah Rose Sharp

On February 1, 2016

In Paintings, Sculpture

N’Namdi Winter Line-Up :Warm Woodworks and Emotional Moving Blankets

ncoca

Each work by Johnny Coleman in his main gallery show at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art http://nnamdicenter.org/ is dedicated to someone; “For Maya Angelou,” some say, or “For Wendall Logan,”—Andre Burbridge, Toni Morrison, Brother Yusef, Kamau Daaood, even one dedicated more generally “For the Poets.” This is fitting with the show’s title, Homage: Regular Folk, which reflects Coleman’s sense that these illustrious names “Are all regular folk…each of them is deeply connected to the people and cultures from which they emerged. They do not set themselves apart.”

Johnny Coleman “Poem for Brother Yusef”, 2015/16, Mixed media, audio

Johnny Coleman, “Lifted” (For Shoulders), 2015, Mixed media

The homage is paid through totemic arrangements of found materials, including musical instruments, salvaged wood, and chalkboards. Coleman speaks of the chalkboards as a visual articulation of memory: “Though erased, one can see traces of what has been written there before.” But all of his materials radiate a residual energy, infusing his precisely finished woodworks with a sense of soul. The central, and most elaborate, installation features a tabletop composition supported by a base made of wood-framed chalkboard segments, which stands before an illuminated fabric scrim, amid a carpet of oak leaves. The scene is peaceful and full of autumn melancholy; gourds loll in the thick, even, scattering of leaves, two little stools support oregano and basil stuffed in bottle gourds. There is sense of an odd and elevated picnic in progress, with the table full of dry brown rice that serves to anchor a spread which includes a medley of spices, a bamboo flute, and a recovered radio set, among other items. Underscoring this ceremonial layout is an improvisation on “12 Bar Blues,” interspersed with found sound, including Yusef Lateef’s breath, and afternoon traffic outside the Detroit Public Library. Says Coleman, “The relationship between “Poem For Brother Yusef” and the blues piece emerging from within the installation, for me, speaks to the manner in which Yusef Lateef in particular, and jazz and the blues in general, serve as vehicles for the transformation of struggle and pain into something more than tenacity.”

John Egner, “Two Tone Plinth 2012, Wood

John Egner, “Al Dente Top”, 2012-15, Wood

This is just one of almost a dozen incredibly thoughtful arrangements in Homage: Regular Folk. The incredible care in finishing these materials creates smooth and engaging tones and surfaces that speak to the sonorous qualities that lend wood to be the base material of stringed instruments. The impact of wood as a versatile material is demonstrated perfectly in the works of John Egner in the Rose Gallery. The simply-titled Wood Constructions tells it like it is, with just over a dozen compact wall hangings that suggest architectural scale models or clusters of frame-shop samples, at a glance. The small, interlocking pieces of each arrangement build up layers of depth and an interplay of colors with natural wood tones, creating little modernist houses that perch somewhere between two and three dimensions. There is glorious tension here; one imagines each piece being constructed like a game of Jenga, with Egner precariously removing and adding little slips of wood, one at a time, to find the perfect stopping point between balance and collapse.

Saffell Gardner, – Cosmic Spirits, installation view

Saffell Gardner, One within the “Cosmic Spirits” series, 2015, 72 1/2” x 81 1/2”, Acrylic on moving blanket

Eschewing wood, but picking up on spiritual explorations, a new body of work, Cosmic Spirits, by Saffell Gardner fills the Black Box Gallery and stretches along the corridor. Inside the gallery, large-scale pieces rendered on heavily gessoed moving blankets layer riots of color and form over a base layer of geometrics created by the quilting of the blankets. Gardner first experimented with moving blankets as canvases during the 2014 Big Painting show, and finds them attractive for both the texture and the scale. “The quilting texture added the depth that felt was necessary for the spiritual aspect I wanted to convey in this series of paintings,” says Gardner. With the overlay of painted shapes—including the iconic Xhango, a double-ax shape that has been a recurring motif in Gardner’s work for quite a few years—and the underlying geometries places his work in conversation with Enger’s. The sense of cosmic exploration and connection to influential figures aligns it very much with Coleman’s. “What I see going on is my idea of a tribute to my ancestors the were lost during middle passage,” says Gardner.

All three of the shows, which will run at N’Namdi until April 1^st, bring a unique perspective to the table, but the overall effect is quite seamless, with the mastery each of these artists brings to his craft grounding their playful and heartfelt explorations. Whether you’re interested in tributes to regular folk, meditations on cosmic spirits, or just simple wood constructions, N’Namdi’s winter line-up has something inspiring to offer.

52 E Forest Ave, Detroit, MI 48201 (313) 831-8700

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Beyond Photography @ Public Pool

By Sarah Rose Sharp

On January 12, 2016

Photo Pool Takes Over Hamtramck

Noah Elliott Morrison's photo instrallation

Noah Elliott Morrison’s photo illustration. All Photographs courtesy of Sarah Rose Sharp.

The stated objective of Photo Pool: Photography Based Art Beyond Photographs at Public Pool is clear from the title—Curator Noah Elliott Morrison has assembled a collection of artists attempting to use photography as a jumping-off point for artistic exploration that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of the medium. In this respect, the show is very successful, with five artists (including Morrison) that take their photographic inspiration in wildly divergent directions.

Brandon Christopher – A Flock of Re-Imagined House Portraits

The immediate impulse is to place these presentations into a kind of hierarchy of relative closeness to conventional photography, but the impossibility of doing so reveals the success of Photo Pool in collecting artists that both embrace the photographic medium and consciously dismantle it. Brandon Christopher, for example, begins with relatively straightforward portraits of abandoned Detroit homes, but violates the purity of these as photographs by pairing them with colored-over versions of the same images, effectively rendering the homes as though drawn by an imaginative child.

Ash Arder – Net Worth 1

Ash Arder uses photography as a logical means for documentation, in her explorations of found objects in and out of context. In “Net Worth 1,” a photograph features a rusty basketball hoop on the street, displayed in juxtaposition with a white-washed version of a similar hoop, its makeshift net hand woven from stinging nettle fibers. Nearby, a second piece of the installation titled “Strange Fruit” is comprised of a set of three (faux) red apples suspended within another matrix of nettle fibers; close viewing reveals a barcode sticker with the unmistakable Air Jordan logo visible through the loose knit of nettles. As with Christopher’s work, the photographic elements ground the subject in physical reality, even as Arder begins to weave these elements of the material and cultural world together to paint a sinister tale.

Trisha Holt – Work reaches onto floor

One might argue that Trisha Holt’s piece, which sits a floor level, is the most directly photographic. It appears to be a largely unaltered image of a large body of water in two segments—the serene surface stretching back to fill the plane of an image leaning against the wall, a small wave cresting to break within the piece lying flat on the floor. But Holt’s use of these two vectors plays a neat trick of incorporating this incongruous image seamlessly into the gallery space, having cleverly fitted her floor piece into the trap door that enables basement access from the gallery. Holt’s work often negotiates new dimensionality in photography, playing off the odd tricks of perspective that occur when photographs with their own depth are reincorporated into new images (much like the dislocating effect of posing for a picture next to a cardboard cutout of a celebrity). Her piece manages to create a sense that the wave might break across the gallery floor at any moment.

Ben Saginaw – Couter Intuitive Pairings

Challenging as they are understated, an installation of pieces by Ben Saginaw fall perhaps the farthest outside conventional photography—a great achievement in a show filled with mixed media. Two pillow forms cast from dense plaster are on display above two small photographs that feature indeterminate scenes in progress; in one, a small girl appears to be shooting a handgun. The pillows, which are ostensibly soft and harmless, are in fact heavy. The girl, Saginaw states, is shooting cans with her family on a summer evening in Detroit. So close to the anniversary of the death of Tamir Rice, a young boy shot by police for playing with a toy gun in the open-carry state of Ohio, the image cannot help but remind us the high stakes surrounding what we think we see, when we see things.

Suspended before the gallery’s back wall is Morrison’s own work, which layers semi-translucent photographic images taken in Hamtramck into a dense patchwork of visual information, lit up by a hovering flock of flashlights. Morrison’s intention was to create a metaphor for the densely layered qualities of life in Hamtramck—the installation is best viewed from behind, as the flashlight beams enhance details from each layer that remain distinct in the visual chaos.

From lake views, to the comforts of home, to life on the streets, Photo Pool: Photography Based Art Beyond Photographs lives up to its title in a focused and satisfying way that leaves this reviewer itching to revisit the medium.

Photo Pool: Photography Based Art Beyond Photographs: http://apublicpool.com