Sketches, oil paintings, and collages by local artist, Nym Pedersen, are on display at WriterHouse for the month of May.
Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Local artist Nym Pedersen understood Picasso’s quest and long ago joined the master on the road to imaginative artistic expression. Of course, Pedersen does not literally paint like a child, but he has maintained that direct, unadulterated quality that so many artists lose after years of technical training. No, his forms are not perfectly modeled and his compositions are not flawlessly articulated, but Pedersen’s oil paint goes directly from the tube to the canvas. This lack of meditation results in work of resounding self-expression.
Influenced by pre-World War I German Expressionism, Pedersen shows us the absurd, the amusing, and the more sordid aspects of modern life. He does not make overt commentary on currents events, but they unconsciously seep into his eclectic collages. Sometimes the face of Andy Warhol converges with that of Sir Winston Churchill, sometimes his faces develop fierce teeth and stares, and other times the viewer cannot tell what is human or animal. In whatever form, an infectious emotive quality is ever-present.
Pedersen explains yet another influence, “Making paintings and sculpture is a great joy, and in our twisted times feels like a privilege too. I keep in mind the approach of many great jazz musicians when applied to visual art: paint what you feel. And keep it free,” he said.
Like the great jazz masters of the past, he transforms his own introspective journey into abstract works that are ethereal yet honest visual expressions. His art is original and universal, touching all who experience it, showing life at its most vulnerable, yet most powerful. He depicts that time before we are told what is beautiful, correct, proper, vulgar-when the playing field is leveled and no one hides who they are.
Pedersen’s new show, “Now and Then” opens with a wine reception from 5:30-7:30pm at the WriterHouse Gallery Friday May 3rd as a part of Charlottesville’s First Friday. The reception is free and open to the public.
Local artist Clay Witt moved his studio into Second Street for the month of February to curate additions to his exhibition “In Thunder, Lightning, or in Rain” on site. Photo: John Robinson
“Perhaps we aren’t being controversial enough,” Steve Taylor, the director of Second Street Gallery, joked during a recent interview after explaining that no one had walked out of a show in a huff recently.
Beneath the joke lay the inherent tension in Taylor’s job: Second Street’s mission for the past 40 years has been to bring contemporary art to the people at no cost. The task involves keeping a nonprofit board engaged and motivated, raising an operating budget, selecting exhibitions that appeal to the general public in a small Virginia city, and attracting the work of cutting edge artists from around the world without a huge budget and major art market as bait.
“We show work that you wouldn’t otherwise see,” Taylor explained. “Part of our job is not just to open eyes but to open minds. . . If somebody says, ‘I hate contemporary art,’ I’ll say, ‘Well what kind of art do you like and why?’ I’m not going to try to convince them to like something they don’t like . . . You can’t convince people to like things, but you can open their minds to the idea behind it.”
Second Street was founded as Central Virginia’s first artist-run alternative art space on February 11, 1973 by a group of artists and academics searching for a place to show their work where survival did not depend on making sales. The gallery, one of the longest surviving nonprofit organizations in the nation focused solely on the art and ideas of the time, has held 10 to 15 shows per year for the past four decades, approximately 500 exhibitions of painting, photography, and installations in total.
Second Street Gallery Director Steve Taylor stands at the intersection of compelling, cutting edge art and the Charlottesville community. Photo: John Robinson
While the organization’s mission has remained remarkably stable over that period, the times they have a-changed. The gallery has moved three times, before finding a permanent home in 2003 at 115 Second St. where they now share a building created specifically for the gallery, and for fellow arts nonprofits Light House and Live Arts. Downtown has gone from a little-used sleepy corner of the city to its thriving cultural center. And the fashion sense of Second Street’s board of directors has, well, um, altered.
“When we look at the photograph of the founders of Second Street Gallery in 1973, it’s like they are dressed in period costume, and have just come from a Jefferson Airplane concert. Perhaps they have,” said Dean Dass, a local artist and an honorary board member at Second Street. “It is also like they have just come from a Vietnam War protest. Perhaps they have. The founding of Second Street Gallery in 1973 has to be seen as part of a worldwide movement of the creation of cooperatives and alternative spaces.”
As a UVA third year who has interned at another Downtown gallery, Chroma Projects, for the past three years, I have been actively involved in the Charlottesville art world since I arrived from Dallas. I found First Fridays during my first months of school and by last summer I had announced my intention to become an art curator, much to my parents’ chagrin. Whenever I want to feel close to the big city art scene I left behind, or when someone asks me about the local art scene, I usually direct them to Second Street, because it democratizes art. It knocks art off of its metaphoric, elevated pedestal, bringing world class exhibitions into an approachable, intimate space.
The gallery is a place where people can interact, view, question, and experience the art and ideas of our moment without the pressure to buy something and without looking over your shoulder at an NYU grad student with French eyeglass frames. It isn’t even 10′ from a bus stop on Water Street.
A local artist in his own right (painter and photographer), a member of McGuffey Art Center, and a past board member of Second Street, Taylor knows the mission of his gallery is to instigate a conversation, not to make money. And, in some ways, he feels the best way to gauge his performance is to look at the faces of the people who see his exhibitions. Nonplussed? No good. Wide-eyed? Right on.
“Well I love a show with technical bravado and ones that catch you off guard and make you think. I think that’s what we do. Hopefully we are a bit of a visual feast when we can be. But, when we can be visual for the soul, that is when we do our best work,” he said.
Pop art mass producer Steve Keene prepares his assembly line of plywood “canvases” for his Second Street show in 2008. “It’s a performance,” said Keene about his work. Photo: Courtesy Second Street Gallery
Take the Daniel Canogar show “Reboot,” which exhibited in March of 2012. Second Street volunteers had to clean up after the gallery’s annual family day, which saw 350 people in the space; take down a previous exhibition; and transform the place into a light-proof box to showcase the Spanish artist’s magical installations of light projected over ghostly forms created from 70 pounds of multicolored computer wires, purchased and scrounged locally.
The results were worth the 460 hours of volunteer time logged during the monumental six-day effort, since visitation doubled from a monthly average of 600 to close to 1,200 people. It also attracted strong financial support from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and a host of individual donors.
Children and adults viewed the Canogar show on various intellectual levels. “It was like a magic garden for them talking about fairies and fireflies. And later, we had a group of older men talking about chaos theory and brain synapses,” Taylor said.
Not every show is a smash hit, though, and some are openly disliked.
“We don’t shy away from that. Not everyone is going to love every show. I don’t love every show. Some shows are more easy to access,” Taylor said.
Anne Slaughter, an early board member at Second Street and a founding member of the McGuffey Art Center, attended the gallery’s opening night, a proper vantage point from which to evaluate the success of an idea she watched evolve into a pillar of the arts community she loves.
“It has survived some very lean times financially. A lot of galleries close. But it has maintained its quality. It has always maintained its national character,” she said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”
Brent Birnbaum’s “ …And Justice for Mall Of America” at Second Street Gallery suggests we leave our crack tennies and other cultural misnomers at the door. Bombarding the viewer with hundreds of potent cultural images, his searing and clever installation of contemporary Americana announces the territory of the deal.
Introducing his show with “Shoecide Mix,” Birnbaum immediately identifies his terms. Shoes removed from their wearer become surrogates representative of his population. An urban pair of disembodied shoes could represent victims from gang violence. We recall them strung high over telephone wires, indicating drug locations, marking gang territory, or commemorating an assault. As a rainbow in shape and color, they potentially reference homosexuality. Shoes are both status symbols, and ritual objects, rich with diverse content.
Birnbaum’s work epitomizes a society that strives to be assaulted by visual stimulation, images and advertisements, on television, billboards, and even clothing. Branding is a theme here and he displays America through the ages brought to you by Playboy, “The Simpsons,” Miley Cyrus, and various sports teams.
His work includes large-scale installation pieces and smaller mixed media works on paper. Plastic toys are juxtaposed and aggregated absurdly with pictures from magazines and photographs. Pop culture is our way of life now, and is inescapable in Birnbaum’s world. Not only does he make this statement, but under the layers are allusions to racism, xenophobia, and religion.
When confronting these issues, Birnbaum often takes a literal approach. He depicts actual aliens where images of foreigners would be. He portrays our consumer culture and the problems inherently involved with it. The toys from vending machines are a commentary on the people who buy them: Put in a quarter, and instantly receive what you want. This instant gratification mentality ties these pieces together. With the desire to be immediately satisfied, it doesn’t matter what misconceptions arise as long as your appetite for the now is sated.
Birnbaum’s grandest work entitled “Trail of Beers” is the culmination of what he attempts to work out in his smaller pieces. He interweaves stereotypes about Native American culture with American iconography, irreverently hanging tomahawks on Crocs and pinning them to an assortment of beer boxes in a 12-step pyramid that implies alcoholism. The beer boxes and engraved cans with ritualistic symbols draw the viewer in, prompting an interaction with the large scale production. It is intentionally offensive and speaks to what happens when people let bigotry and prejudice inform their opinions.
While society is accustomed to overstimulation by movies and television, it’s usually a one way relationship. We receive information through those mediums, but rarely think about it. Birnbaum attacks our senses in the same way, but his art is interactive. He creates a dialogue with the viewer about pervasive and sensitive topics with the possible intention that they will then be discussed.
Birnbaum takes his work in a different direction when he combines Snuggies with traditional prayer rugs. Here, he interprets religion in America today. Proposing that instead of cloaking ourselves in religion, we turn to the marketplace for security and reassurance. This is more pronounced when he combines the Washington Redskin’s football team logo with the prayer rugs. Athletics are not just for entertainment, but a belief system. Birnbaum criticizes his perceived superficiality of American culture by juxtaposing symbols within our society with prayer rugs emblematic of Islamic worship. Should we ask whether it is appropriate to use actual prayer rugs, cut, distorted, and taken out of their intended context to make this statement? It is easy to be amused by and poke fun at our own unholy culture, but is it exploiting another’s while trying to achieve this end?
Birnbaum has emerged from a lineage of artists that can be traced to the “Assemblage” group in New York during the 1960s. Robert Rauschenberg, for example, took everyday materials, elevated them to the level of art in order to confront the viewer with contemporary social issues and problems. Instead of being a passive receiver of information, the artist sought active participation within our culture in order to transform. Birnbaum’s assemblages push this tradition even further than his predecessors. While subliminal messages certainly exist under the layers of color, objects, and images, his message exaggerates, his work is representative of a culture easily distracted; a society that often chooses to be hyper-stimulated. Wandering among the appealing detritus of carnival-like confusion, viewers unaware of the artist’s ambiguous undertones may find themselves guilty as charged. As you leave, be sure to pick your shoes up at the door.
Have your say. Drop a line to mailbag@c-ville.com, send a letter to 308E. Main St., or post a comment at c-ville.com.
“…And Justice for Mall of America” Brent Birnbaum at Second Street Gallery Through December 21
