I’m one of those people who cleans compulsively. I snap into straighten up mode when I feel overwhelmed by the number of notebooks on the sideboard, of unattended flip-flops by the door, of projects on my inexhaustible to-do list.
In my world, order reigns as a reflex—a knee-jerk to save me from drowning in chaos. But why in the world do people like me choose to fight this losing battle?
Virginia artists Felicia Brooks and Leigh Anne Chambers invite this question to the foreground of their new exhibit “A Language Must Be Found.” Curated by Isabelle Brooks, the intern at Chroma Projects, the show includes abstract paintings created over ready-made materials. In Chambers’ case, they’re pieces of vinyl flooring and other cast-offs re-imagined as exploratory art.
The director of the Rawls Museum of Art in Courtland, Virginia, Chambers writes in an e-mail interview with C-VILLE that she initially worked on unstretched canvas hung on the walls of her house, making her bright splashes of color and irregular drippings on clean backgrounds. Inspiration struck when she “wondered what would happen if I painted directly” on to the vinyl flooring she’d been using to protect her walls.
The result was a new layer of metaphor in her work, a deep dive into the utility and thoughtful consideration of social scraps. “With my art, I am interested in pushing boundaries so that the audience is challenged with the idea of looking at something that could be discarded and considering it as something more,” she writes. “For example does the work have to be presented so that it looks like a painting rather than a heap of vinyl flooring? And how much information do you have to include in a painting for it to be read as a painting?”
Brooks, a Charlottesville-based art therapist, is less inclined to push external limits than internal ones. Though her works in “A Language Must Be Found” were developed on bargain-priced Michael’s wall art, the sort of 12″x12″ canvases spray painted black and printed with messages like “Live, Laugh, Love,” she chose them not for symbolic value but rather because they were cheap and she’s a fan of recycling.
“I paint over my work all the time,” Brooks says. “If I could paint on a canvas forever, I would. I know and love everything under the layers, and they become part of [a painting’s] history.” Indeed, her work often resembles keyhole designs, with broadly brushed acrylic dissolving to show layers upon layers of movement underneath.
She shares the belief that patterns emerge through methodical process with Chambers, who writes that “I am always thinking about relationships from one element in a piece to another, for example paint that has created a marbled effect on its own versus the marks that I make intentionally against that paint. I am also thinking about my own relationships with people and ideas, and whatever I am reading or listening to musically informs the work in some way.”
If Chambers defines order as purely relational, Brooks chooses to dance with it. “After I start focusing on bringing forth the shapes and the forms by manipulating the canvas with the paint, the shapes take on a personality of their own. Like ‘You were hiding in that corner, and you were over there, so how do you relate to that one?” she says.
Both artists have pursued their craft for the majority of their lives. Chambers remembers going on a school field trip to a museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was allowed to help paint the background for an exhibit; she went on to receive both a BFA in painting and an MFA in visual art. Brooks began scribbling when she was just a young girl, and her identity as an artist anchored her throughout school.
Brooks describes how painting has become “a form of meditation. It’s a way to help me connect with myself on a much deeper level. It’s a way to stay grounded and present and also to get outside of myself because I’m working with whatever form presents itself through the act of painting.”
The instinct to find order in chaos is a deeply human need, a longing we attempt to satiate with the taxonomies of science and the tenants of faith. On her website, Chambers explains that her process turns on “George Bataille’s idea of formless,” a notion that “describes the need to give form to everything in order to make it comprehensible.”
She remembers her own young instincts as she attempted to order her world: “I had an art teacher in high school that did not match his plaids when he dressed. I still remember that and wondered why he just did not get it together.”
Most of us want to impose order on chaos to beat back the fear that life is meaningless, that we may be mortal without purpose, that we can’t or won’t make a difference. For these women, art is the answer.
Chambers no longer depends on a culturally informed construction of cleanliness. Brooks, for her part, finds ultimate power in the opposite of deliberation. “Mark making is really important to me,” she says. “Just the simple act of creating a mark on canvas can be so beautiful and so personal. It becomes your own language.”
“A Language Must be Found” is on display at Chroma Projects, 107 Vincennes Rd., through August 23.