Author: CM Gorey

Categories
Arts Culture

Fridays after Five: Shagwüf with Holy Roller

Publicity photo.

Ting Pavilion, July 19

On its face, it seems awfully early in the evening to lose it for the kind of rock ’n’ roll you’ll get out of Shagwüf. Then again, with that Fridays after Five offer (um, free), you can’t exactly complain about it either. A mainstay of local music stages, the self-proclaimed “sweet freaks” are actually more sweet than freaky on stage. Still, keep an eye out or you might get your drink kicked out of your hand. Bassist Sally Rose (also of the much better-behaved Sally Rose Band) and guitarist Sweet Pete make it easy to get lost: Their pop hooks keep coming at you, harkening back to musical archetypes from across the decades while keeping the energy frenzied and the crowd cavorting. The results of Shagwüf’s sound tend to come up as fuzzy, unflinching head-boppers that can easily dance sideways into snaking rhythms suggestive of world music, thanks to the flailing intensity of drummer Pablo Olivieri. Ultimately it’s slightly psychedelic, kinda indie, a touch of sludge, with the faintest whiff of stoner rock. Not that you should ever ever quote Billy Joel, but I guess it is still rock ’n’ roll to me.

—CM Gorey

Categories
Arts Culture

Andrew Bird and Nickel Creek with Mike Viola 

Publicity photo.

Ting Pavilion, July 17

Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird has been in a few noteworthy bands and has released or joined in on more records than we have space to discuss here. The singer and songwriter first came to fame collaborating with swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers in the late 1990s and went on to put out three big, brave, folksy swing albums under the name Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. On his own for years now, Bird tends to be found playing violin—sometimes with the support of looping pedals—but he gets his hands on many other stringed instruments as well. He’s also known for his virtuosity as a whistler, but don’t hold that against him. These days, Bird mostly performs under his own name as he delves into many mixed influences ranging from indie to jazz. His latest with the Andrew Bird Trio, Sunday Morning Put-On, sticks firmly to the latter genre with a 90 percent track list of standards. We can’t be sure whether that choice flat-out nixes the chances of him doing anthemic tracks like “Fake Palindromes” or the acoustic retro catchiness of “Sisyphus,” but one can always hope his live show won’t stay too rooted in the songs of others when he’s got so many good ones of his own.

Grammy Award-winning Nickel Creek belies the simplicity of the fact that the band is made up of a guitarist, a fiddler, and a mandolinist who are also relentless harmony singers. After nine years away, the band released its fifth album Celebrants, in 2023, which saw the group branch out even further from its bluegrass roots. The best Nickel Creek songs stray from expectations—across lyrics, arrangement, chord composition, and, on its recordings, surprising production choices. The trio combines soaring voices and enough ingenuity to make you think bluegrass is much bigger than categorization, and, in Nickel Creek’s case, it’s about playing outside the genre’s box—without having to chuck out the box. Listen to the Celebrants tracks “Holding Pattern” back-to-back with “Where the Long Line Leads” and it’ll all be perfectly clear.

—CM Gorey

Categories
Arts Culture

Achieving maximum heaviness and then some

Baroness gets heavy into genre-hopping at The Jefferson on Saturday. Publicity photo.

A metal band in that they definitely sound “heavy” across a large swath of their six album, full-length catalog (big riffs, distorted guitars, emphatic and aggressive vocals), it’s helpful to think of Baroness in terms of pre- and post-bus accident. After the tragic descent of a bus near Bath, England, in August 2012, things changed as the band’s approach and personnel evolved. Lead vocalist/guitarist and main visionary John Baizley broke his arm and leg in the bang-up, and the other injured members eventually left. Some time around 2017, the current lineup was nailed down as captured on 2019’s Gold and Grey and last year’s Stone.

Taking genre-hopping as far as a metal-leaning band can—that is, the gist never gets as obscurely frenetic as what John Zorn’s Naked City accomplished in the ’90s with country-to-surf-to-death metal in mere seconds—the results feel honest and firmly connected to Baroness’ overall aesthetics and pristinely adept craft. For example, a song like “Cocainium” from 2012’s Yellow and Green mists with the quiet entry of a meditation soundtrack only to turn on you at multiple points: Unassuming soft-stepping trippy ’60s-stained disco sonics follow with a full-on, fuzzed-out premium distortion drive—the kind that makes heads bang. On their most recent record, “Beneath the Rose” carries the faintest echoes of Megadeth’s cynical “Peace Sells” vocal, but Baizley’s spoken delivery shifts to layered atonal harmonies, eventually giving way to surprising acoustic guitar overlays, only to swivel again, unleashing the melodic drama of throaty shouting and gnashing rhythms.

Despite hurling the power of 1,000-pound steel riffage Baroness proves capable of, they also pour out a wealth of softer dynamics. Stone is bookended with downhome finger-picking and sweet, calm harmonies on “Embers” and “Bloom,” where Baizley and lead guitarist Gina Gleason meld together in a folksy way that would not sound out of place at The Front Porch. 

You could call the band prog in that they play really well and don’t shy away from occasional noodling. On the other hand, they don’t sound like they’re trying to scare you, or worse, bore you with their fluency. Having said that, when Baroness is in attack mode, there are familiar touchstones that make for inevitable comparisons; saying they’re like Queen or Metallica or Tool when relying on strong guitar takes, or stepping into Pink Floyd territory when they get introspective, is probably oversimplification. Bluntly put: They don’t have one sound, so if you don’t like what you’re hearing, wait two minutes and you might find yourself in love. 

While openers Ruby the Hatchet may not match the genre-switching facility that Baroness flaunts, the band is proudly content to make up for it in both feel and spirit. A darkly mystical hard rock defined by Jillian Taylor’s gutsy singing and powered by Sean Hur’s organ motor, it recalls the type of late ’60s and early ’70s hazy, pulsating grooves that make it all too easy to give in and zone out. Doom/stoner tracks lit up their excellent Valley of the Snake (2015), and for their most recent work, Fear Is a Cruel Master (2022), Ruby the Hatchet streamlined its approach somewhat, chugging onward majestically gilded by promises of more anthemic music to come. Get to The Jeff early.

Categories
Arts Culture

Look into it

Josh Dorman says his complex dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a 1998 record by Neutral Milk Hotel. Photo: Eze Amos

Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. Expect to have long looks, but be aware that conclusions may vary: Prepare to be confounded or frustrated or fascinated or delighted—or all of the above.

On the walls of Second Street’s main space, Dorman helpfully admits the open-ended intent of his art, yet he lays his muse bare from the get-go anyway: the 1998 record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He says that his complex explosive dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to the album and “derive a poetic inspiration” from its “language and internal logic.” Dorman himself—and indeed, a consensus across the internet—believes that the words of the band’s visionary Jeff Magnum are beyond any rational explanation. Where does that leave us?

If that squirrelly meaning best defines the indie rock influence for his work, it’s admittedly difficult to draw direct parallels to the Neutral Milk Hotel songs beyond the borrowed titles and lyrical phrases. At least for me it is, since my familiarity with the group pretty much begins and ends in knowing it’s the favorite band of April Ludgate from “Parks and Recreation.

No matter, though, because there’s a great deal to digest and decipher. In a way, Dorman’s shiny resin-coated ink, acrylic, and antique paper on wood panels are reminiscent of the nightmare fauna in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Faceless human busts lurk, headless animals and beasts hewn of later industrial age debris plunge ass-over-head into waterfalls, helplessly ride conveyor belts, and foolishly climb precarious cliffs. They navigate worlds with opaque perspectives: a pastiche of landscapes folding upon themselves with blueprint guidelines tussling for space against mountain crags while classical columns hover over railway bridges.

Tapestries and cushions, by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack, are currently on display in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Photo: Eze Amos

Dorman’s most uniquely effective device is his use of depth. What might function as a decorative gimmick in a lesser artist’s hands provides one of the strongest arguments to visit Second Street to see these works in person, as two-dimensional photos fail to capture them. Some employ an inward layering of resin to form swirling wave pools, active insect nests, or in “Villa of the Mysteries” (2018), a flesh-eating cauldron rife with capillary-like root growth. His mix of painting with collage reflects a mind at play—in “Excavating Babel” (2020), Dorman recasts the scissored relics of aged book illustrations into a city of no particular century, pointing its mismatched spires into the nebulous belly of an improbable sky. Psychedelic, sure. But there’s more than simple trippiness here. The problem—or the solution, maybe—is that any kind of narrative will likely only reveal itself to the individual. Like hundreds of Rorschach tests exposed at once, each piece defies you to focus.

More uneven cityscapes await in Second Street’s intimate Dové Gallery, where Doyle and McCormack trade tapestries and cushions. That’s not a putdown, because for all the textile in the space, the products of their handiwork are not what anyone would sanely call comforting.

Textile art rarely trades in urban grit as thoroughly as Doyle does here, with figures striding atop strata of subterranean profundity that is home to a bestiary of surprising beings engulfed in murky topographies. Angry sexuality pops out in the nude flipping us the bird in “Six Feet High” (2018). Others construct hazier moods and dare us to trust our eyes. An outsized female treads upon a sewer grate that leads into a striped-horizon fantasy world, while in “The Witness” (2017), a face lords over high rises and under a graffiti tag-style rendering of the word “SEEN,” while further below, a rift unearths deep space and a passing satellite. “Ebbflow” (2015) features a shadow crossing a starry field, but beneath it, another time and/or another location is let loose. 

The deliberately irregular shapes of the tapestries themselves are creations as personal as the artist’s relationship with urban life. And a second connection to Dorman emerges in the difficulty of determining our point of view: Here, too, staking out temporal and geographic assurance is a bitch. 

McCormack, Doyle’s show partner, brings an ironic hand to crocheted bird skeletons (“Thicket I & II,” 2020, “Swim Team,” 2021) and lusty westerners (“Libidinous Drifter,” 2021), as well as smirkingly provocative textual pieces like “You Know He Told Everyone” (2021), a banner proclaiming “Edging” (“Modesty Blanket,” 2021), and a pillow topped by a handgun appliqué (“Sweet Dreams,” 2021). McCormack’s works encourage speculation like good gossip; the phrases concoct a humorous, sinister theme that carries the immediate intrigue of overhearing a single line of a passerby fighting with someone on the phone. And as far as stitched pillow messages go, ”Live, Laugh, Love” this ain’t.

“how strange it is to be anything at all” Josh Dorman
& “Dirty Mirror”  Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack

Second Street Gallery

Through November 19

Categories
Arts Culture

Old order, new visions: Rochelle Sumner and Will Kerner bring isolation out in the open

You can find The Bonnet Maker’s works at Second Street Gallery’s “Teeny Tiny Trifecta 3” show; the gallery’s online “BondBound 2020” exhibition; online in the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives’ “Inside” exhibition; and at bonnetmaker.com. Image courtesy of the artist

Ida Mitchell Puffenbarger wasn’t an artist. If she had any inclination, she likely didn’t have the time. With the bulk of her days spent cleaning, cooking, caring for her family, and attending church, she also didn’t mix with people outside her religious community of Old German Baptist Brethren. She dressed plainly and, like the other female believers in Franklin, West Virginia, wore a bonnet as a symbol of the Biblical concept of headship, which states that women’s purpose is to be subordinate to men as part of God’s order of creation. She died in 1972.

Her life, faith, and the bonnet she wore every day came to serve as artistic inspiration to someone in her family who she never knew. Rochelle Sumner, Ida’s great-granddaughter, discovered the old order dress and prayer coverings in a trunk—remnants of a different time, colored by a tenacious self-seclusion and heavy with the presence of a rigid belief system.

“I began thinking about the women in my family, and how we’ve covered ourselves for generations,” says Sumner. Reflecting on the fact that Ida was the last woman of her family to wear a bonnet and dress plainly, she believes the metaphorical version—emotional distance and hiding from outsiders as a form of protection—still runs deeply through the psyche of her relatives. That bonnet and what it came to represent took on something greater in scope, and thus The Bonnet Maker was born.

It’s hard to pin down the project by the specifications that classify most fine art, but it connects performance, brief narrative writing, and photography. The latter portions are visually directed by Will Kerner, photographer and a co-founder of Charlottesville’s Live Arts and Light House Studio, whom Sumner met in October of 2017. Sumner says that the collaboration works because of Kerner’s empathy for the character—and for her when she embodies it.

Donning a costume based upon her great-grandmother’s dresses and bonnets from the 1940s and 1950s, modified with an elongated cape and apron, Sumner and Kerner create engaging results captured in photos and buttressed by lines of text.

The Bonnet Maker traverses empty natural settings and passes through mundane structures given new, ominous contexts; parking lots surrender in post-apocalyptic black and white sunshine, mirrored structures magnify a greater rift between past and present. Changes brought on by the pandemic have intensified the isolation of the character and infused the visuals. Much can be said of gender issues, systems of oppression, and contemporary isolation, both self-imposed and those brought about by society.

In nearly every context, The Bonnet Maker character appears pained, struggling with an inner conflict simmering right at the surface. As reining in that conflict creates tension, the project’s interpretation of a belief system produces another kind of fragile balance.

Both artists maintain the importance of respecting the OGBB community as they explore its ideals artistically. Kerner, like Sumner, is also of a German protestant denomination (the relatively less-strict Moravians), and says the idea of “an older religious sect being placed into the context of today’s world” is part of what appealed to him about becoming involved in the project.

The pair started creating at the end of 2017 when Sumner, in her OGBB costume, and Kerner visited a live nativity scene at Church of the Brethren in Rockingham County, which was also the first time she wore the outfit in public.

“I was very nervous because I didn’t know how people would react to seeing an old order woman at their church,” she recalls.

Other times, they’ve taken to shooting in even more unscripted situations. On Instagram (@thebonnetmaker), the hooded figure confronts nacho food trucks, beauty queens, and police officers. The results are more akin to a documentary capturing the cultural and temporal dissonance, with Sumner’s character drawing smiles and stares from the general public with occasionally comic results.

Kerner says that public shoots, like one at the Rockingham County Fair, can feel edgy because his presence as photographer gives her appearance the buzz of a theatrical event. For Sumner’s part, she tends to stay in character during interactions, but says she’ll drop it if they mention old order heritage in their family.

Interactions aren’t always so breezy. For a performance at Ghost in Reverse at Woolen Mills, Sumner set up a Bonnet Maker Shop, where anyone could try on bonnets and leave written comments about the experience.

“There were angry responses and an aversion by most women who read the large handwritten scroll hanging on the wall,” Sumner says. It recounted St. Paul’s 1,900-year-old instruction about head covering and the headship concept infuriated many women visitors.

“One woman thought I was trying to convert women to the old order, and did not realize it was a performance. It’s good to know I can be that convincing!” Sumner says.

She and Kerner plan to do more performances locally, and to continue creating chapters to the character.

Categories
Culture

Animal diversions: Creature titles we rescued from the canceled VA book fest

Animal-lovers had a lot to look forward to with the Virginia Festival of the Book’s March 2020 lineup—before it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If you’re doing what you’re supposed to do (please say yes), you’re just staying home. For many of us, that means fattening comfort food and boozy evenings binge watching “Tiger King.” Though it’s unquestionably difficult to watch Joe Exotic’s mistreatment of the majestic creatures he’s bred and trapped into an unnatural life, the great cats are a draw for viewers.

Animals fascinate us. Yet those in zoos live their whole lives in a kind of quarantine lockdown and now we’re almost right there with them. Unlike our beastly relatives, we’ve still got options, however small those might seem. In addition to what’s streaming into our homes, we’ve got two other powerful means of escapism: reading books and going for walks outside.

A bevy (rook? business? school?) of animal-themed titles slated to be part of the wisely canceled Virginia Festival of the Book is still available to provide us with a detour from our own thoughts and the onslaught of grim headlines. Through pages ranging from the scientific and ecological to the fictional and symbolic, the authors implore us to recognize how animals of all stripes are constantly striving to overcome difficulties compounded by our recklessness.

Conservationist and Audubon magazine field editor Kenn Kaufman offers Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration. Though we’re all rightfully anxious about how coronavirus may continue to disrupt our lives—let alone all of those lost travel plans—Kaufman’s latest explains how climate change and human development have seriously upended birds’ schedules and flight paths. His timely seasonal tome recounts some of the utterly incredible accomplishments of migrating birds, including those converging along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio.

Take for example the blackpoll warbler. The migratory songbird about the size of a human thumb isn’t much to look at and weighs, appropriate to this article, about as much as a ballpoint pen. Yet this generally nondescript little chirper is known to fly more than 6,000 miles from the Amazon to the Arctic by way of Florida and Ohio. Then, just to spice things up, he takes an alternate route back south. After a rest stop in Massachusetts, it’s a monumental 80-hour flight for four nights and three days—2,000 miles straight to South America. And you’re complaining about getting your steps in this week.

Looking to submerge instead? Author and retired Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries manager Paul Bugas lends his expertise to the Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Virginia. The reference details the denizens of our nearby waterways, drawing on Bugas’ decades of hands-on experience (he’s also a biologist); he and his fellow contributing authors and artists illuminate the commonwealth’s many natural-born swimmers. Tips explain how to collect, handle, and protect central Virginia’s diverse fish populations, but it’s not just for anglers: You’ll learn where you can best observe these fish locally, which, to be fair, will be much easier after the stay-at-home order is lifted.

If you’re more apt to dive into fiction, three novelists offer up thematic forays into the philosophical and political use of beasts.

Washington, D.C.-based Rick Hodges mixes political intrigue with a nature tale in To Follow Elephants, an eco-minded adventure thriller inspired by his travels in Africa. The story of an 18-year-old American seeking out his missing army captain father wraps its narrative around the education of a young elephant by his herd’s matriarch; the resulting style informs Hodges’ novel with a wisdom that transcends the petty squabbles of man, and elevates the pachyderms as characters in their own right.

Speaking of young ones, Johanna Stoberock has created an allegorical work about four children on an island that receives the entire planet’s trash, which the kids sort and feed to a herd of hungry pigs. Lord of the Flies comparisons are inevitable, but Pigs provides another take as the adults occupy a much different function for the endangered youths, acting as cruel overlords; the elders party like the power hungry porkers of Animal Farm while the children toil. The plot thickens when a boy suddenly washes ashore.

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth tells a less fantastic tale, but one that’s no less loony. It’s a half-love/half-heist story about two egg industry auditors and their plot to steal a farm’s million chickens under cover of darkness. The bizarre, funny, and politically charged tale about love’s ability to fuel odd decisions makes grand and cavalier jumps into the minds of chickens—and maybe more unexpectedly— zips thousands of years forward into a bleak future where the animals navigate a planet destroyed by humans. 

Of course, that dire possibility is what people like Kaufman and Bugas have spent their lives warning everyone about, while doing what they could to prevent that kind of catastrophe. And as we’ve got a very real disaster of our very own to contend with, it’s just better to keep the door closed for now, and hunker down with a good book.

Through pages ranging from the scientific and ecological to the fictional and symbolic, the authors implore us to recognize how animals of all stripes are constantly striving to overcome difficulties compounded by our recklessness.

 

Categories
Arts

In Living Black and White—with Shades of Gray: Colorless Expression Proves Lively in Second Street Gallery’s “She’s in Monochrome”

Laura Wooten's "Alentejo" series (this is "Alentejo 5") is now on view in the "She's in Monochrome" show at Second Street Gallery. Image courtesy Second Street Gallery

What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright?

Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have no basis of comparison. Yet in an interesting challenge, Second Street Gallery’s curator Kristen Chiacchia issued an invitation to local artists to create works that remove their usual reliance on color to express themselves. The resulting exhibition, “She’s in Monochrome,” now occupying SSG’s Dové Gallery until October 25, is surprisingly rich and varied, despite the black, white, and gray rules strictly governing the works on display.

Gray Dodson (whose very name along with fellow artists Sam Gray and Pam Black makes it seem as if she were practically born for this type of show) doesn’t stray from her aesthetic inclination to focus skyward, a go-to subject of hers along with landscapes and images of water. Devoid of her usual soft color interplay, “Big Rain” and “Place of Unknowing” are downright monolithic, with protuberances of cloudbursts taking on an Old Testament lashing out on the land in the former, while muddled sunlight struggles behind the wet wisps of the trees in the latter. We’re entering an unreal setting that’s gloomy but not without a dim glimmer of promise at its heart.

Krista Townsend’s views of the land in “Glacier” and “Vermont Woods” offer a more clear-cut sense of form and shadow in nature. By taking what comes across as a nearly two-dimensional approach while working within the confinement of greys, her work reveals a chilliness that is either a believable presentation of a steely-skied day or an icy night.

Providing an altogether different vision of landscapes, Laura Wooten’s five numbered “Alentejo” pieces expose verdant hillsides robbed of their greens and browns, eliciting colder images of south central Portugal. There’s something of Japanese sumi-e brush painting in her India ink and synthetic Yupo paper, as well; the stark pitch of the land loops and rolls, sliced by lightning bolt walking paths that catch the sun in cool forks, splaying the earth with serpentine pathways.

Nature nearly reaches its simulacrum breaking point in the grandmotherly floral patterns that have found a strange home in Lou Haney’s works on fabric and aluminum. The absence of bright pastels or cheerful shades on the petals of “Black Velvet If You Please” and “Quilt Gilt” are unsettling even to the colorblind eye. The Lycra, cotton, and beadwork feels more wrong than perhaps it should, but that very space is where the profound difference between expectation and this monochromatic reality plays most heavily upon both our senses and ability to interpret without the usual crutches or cues.

Considering the constraints of the show, perhaps the most vivid works come from Sam Gray, who presents mythical plant people occupying sharp locales that shimmer with fantastically cartoonish, stylized graphic qualities. “Cosmic Seed” reveals a being emerging from its plant pod and floating to celestial heights via its free-flying roots. In “New Stories,” the fungal woman ignores the jet goop dripping off her mushroom-capped head despite it getting everywhere—but with good reason, as she’s deep in ritual. Smoldering flame alights her blackened left hand while she draws with her right: a beginning, the start of a circle on a page, in black and white.

Categories
Arts

When love rules: ASC’s Antony and Cleopatra mixes business, pleasure, and more

Geoffrey Kent and Zoe Speas star in American Shakespeare Center’s Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Lindsey Walters

Though Antony and Cleopatra isn’t always considered a problem play, after seeing it at the American Shakespeare Center I can report that it really should be.

Categorizing it as a problem play might be a lazy definition for a work defying easy literary taxonomies, but it does the trick. In ASC’s case (here comes a 413-year-old spoiler), titular characters YOLO-ing themselves into nasty suicides are preceded by pointed zingers, drunken antics, and stage time for a hilarious, snake-handling bumpkin; but the play’s refusal to fit neatly into one genre is amplified in other ways. Take its sword-and-shield action throwdown or constant political wrangling, and you’d swear you’re watching a historical drama; a romance (in our modern sense of the word) bubbles up voyeuristic heart shapes during scenes of a couple who can’t keep their lusty old-world mitts off of each other.

This loose sequel to Julius Caesar (also being performed this season at ASC along with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra) follows one of the murdered ruler’s three successors, Mark Antony, and his all-consuming affair with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. The over-simplified plot: the three-men-led Roman Republic is trying to keep it together despite serious friction, while unsurprisingly, Antony’s nights of ass and alcohol aren’t going over well with his associates or followers.

The takeaways of the play are manifold yet murky, and this performance stresses the difficulty of its essential questions: Can true love exist in the absence of lust? Is it impossible to trust anyone deeply in love? Should we permit the lovesick to hold leadership positions? Are promises between business partners worth less than those made to someone with whom we share our bed?

Shakespeare’s still dead, so I attempted to come to my own conclusions. My lessons learned were pretty pedestrian: Don’t mix business with pleasure and try not to lose your mind when you get into a relationship. Don’t quote me, but I’m reasonably certain that few people besides the anonymous medieval morality playwrights and Bertolt Brecht ever said a night at the theater was supposed to be didactic.

But as a vehicle of entertainment, this version of Antony and Cleopatra is quite good.

Director Sharon Ott’s inventive staging choices constantly recast the sumptuous Blackfriars Playhouse stage. Cleverly lit back curtains part to roll out Cleopatra’s satiny bed, revealing her luxurious inner chamber. Later, a long banner of hieroglyphs descends from the ceiling as the Egyptian ruler and her attendants rise from the floor in the august surroundings of her monument hideout. In Roman scenes, soldiers and guards overlook proceedings from the balcony as their colors blanket Caesar’s power hub. Out on Sextus Pompey’s galley, he and his pirates take to the stage stairs to connote the deck, and a few barrels used as seats do a convincing job of hoisting us aboard the Good Ship Pompey.

Surprisingly, for 42 scenes with locations smeared across Alexandria, Rome, and elsewhere, the settings are easy to imagine, which may not always be the case when watching the typically bare stages of Blackfriars.

Credit is due to designer Murell Horton. Steely Roman marital garb provides austere authority, while flowing Egyptian outfits appear in fresh white before being replaced with darkened threads by play’s end; both major warring parties are buoyed and expertly informed by dress without ever crossing the line into exaggerated parody or Halloween costumery.

Maybe it was the Vienna Lager tallboys I bought from the on-stage bartender, but I’m quite sure that the company’s choice of strategically timed music aided in the believability of the play’s constant shifting of place. Ominous drones menace, thudding drums sketch conflict impressions, horns announce, and percussive, opaque melodies slink beckoningly.

Now about the acting. Certain members of the cast can do no wrong. They’re incredibly versatile professionals who are as at home parading as kings as holding their crotches in agony when playing fools. David Anthony Lewis (Agrippa, Philo), Sylvie Davidson (Iras, Octavia), Constance Swain (Charmian), John Harrell (Maecenas, Messenger), David Watson (Lepidus, Schoolmaster), and Ronald Román-Meléndez (Soothsayer, Pompey, and Ventidius) excel in their craft. Their very presence is engaging as they imprint their style upon the play’s poetry without ever getting tripped up by trying too hard—unlike some cloying, tiring cast members who I won’t name outright.

Happily, Zoe Speas (Cleopatra) and Geoffrey Kent (Antony) exhibit a chemistry that drives the pair’s performances to a much higher level than they seemed capable of alone—but which, to be fair, might be too much to sustain throughout their alternating bouts of self-pitying guilt and jealous rage. They’re best eye-locked in fiery desire. But as we all know, these moments—especially with the ancient world at stake—can’t last. Burning passion only creates problems, particularly for critics unsure of what to do with a history-based rom-com ending in tragedy.

See Antony and Cleopatra at the American Shakespeare Center through November 30.

Categories
Arts

What we do is secret: Private symbologies emerge at Second Street Gallery

Morbid fascination fuels the exhibition “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” at Second Street Gallery in September. Courtesy of the artist

Brooklyn multimedia artist Tamara Santibañez, one of the seven featured in Second Street Gallery’s group show “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” was recently quoted in The New York Times about Latinx artists’ use of family history and heritage. She explained that though her art represents her interests in aggressive underground music, queer kink, and Mexican-American imagery, she doesn’t speak for everyone who identifies with those groups.

Santibañez makes a key point that’s transferable to the multifarious visions constituting “Subculture Shock.” Some Latinx artists regularly draw from a collective pool of symbols and images with “highly individualized interpretations,” and there’s a similar essence informing the SSG exhibition.

Despite common influences, the Second Street show provides an original take on inclusion, bridging gender, sexual orientation, and a diverse set of experiences. Enlightening by delving into the darkness, the exhibition liberates viewers to relive the subcultural jolt the creators experienced during their youth—likely considered deviant acts of self-discovery. Picture it: Lunch periods fixated on piles of Satanist-themed books in the middle school library, afternoons blocking out the adult world’s cowardly warnings with punk’s existential blasts of harmonic fury, and, enticed by ghostly mentors, staring contests with masterworks of their art world predecessors before eventually forging their own illuminating truths.

These varied distillations of those experiences still need to interact in a meaningful way, and thankfully, they do.

“Group shows are often a hodgepodge of artists just thrown together with no cohesive thought,” says Kristen Chiacchia, SSG’s executive director and chief curator. “I wanted to do a show where the artists are not only looking at the same themes and ideas, but one where the result is visually coherent. I purposefully chose art that looks like it goes together.”

Each artist’s personal iconography recalls aspects borrowed from punk’s multigenerational history, then remixed with other subcultural touchstones. Evie Falci’s pieces pull from punk’s recurrent fashion choice of metal studs and black pleather. The Brooklyn-based artist insists the geometric forms reflect her own symbolic order, and the resulting trio of designs feels like a strange confluence of indigenous beadwork with astrological or alchemical musings affixed delicately to the rough-and-ready outerwear of slam dancers.

Santibañez’s aforementioned influences are evident in sculptures bearing brightly-colored Latinx folk art traditions imposed on BDSM gear—a reflection of her own kink expression, but paraphernalia that has long become part of a traditional punk ensemble. She explores her fetishism further in “landscapes,” monochromatic paintings of leather bunched into magnified topographic shapes that embody desires and reflect the grim catechism of an exacting sexual subset. The three pieces create an interesting dialog with Falci’s works.

Continuing the BDSM and occult theme, Jessicka Addams’ contribution, “Childhood Telepathy,” an acrylic on watercolor paper, features a crying face in a cat-shaped, full-head mask commiserating with a similarly distressed disembodied cat head marked with a forehead pentagram. Perhaps best known as the singer of Jack Off Jill during the 1990s, the Los Angeles artist’s chosen subject and medium is imbued with the innocent freedom of color blossoming in pointillist rainbow tears, a vibrant treatment of an undisclosed trauma.

Out in the open, and unavoidable, is the human skull: a go-to emblem of punk logos and album art, an ominous icon of the occult, and the longstanding reminder of mortality. The skull image is a ghoulish refrain played throughout the show. You’ll find it smirking in the mixed-media on paper works from Brooklyn-based Peter Benedetti’s imaginatively tortured and disfigured demons (“This Is Not A Pipe”). It grins through New Yorker Paul Brainard’s graphite images in no less than three iterations of punk legends The Misfits’ skeletal mascot, the Crimson Ghost. Danish artist Frodo Mikkelsen’s paintings incorporate skulls as well, perhaps best realized in his silver-plated skull sculpture, a magical jewel crowned with tiny, detailed architecture.

Taking the concept to its ultimate conclusion, New Jersey artist Porkchop recasts Egyptian royalty, Catholic Marys, gnomes, and historical busts in the cold unifier of death. Repainting found sculptures in stark, smooth blacks, whites, and gold leaf, elicits an otherworldly ghoulishness. Details like his intimate alphabet of reimagined letters underlines the impenetrable nature of death while trading in cryptic mysticism. Porkchop’s altar of unlikely neighbors represents an unfamiliar hierarchy posed with newly ranked, sinister import.

Are these artists fixated with death or is it the byproduct of reveling in a subculture with a grim view of the world? “Subculture Shock” doesn’t give definite answers, but suggests there’s more empowerment, freedom, and fun to be had down in the underworld than what’s clowning in plain sight.

Categories
Arts

It’s complicated: The exquisite perils of Peter Allen’s self-discovery

Pencil art and collaged poetry reveal the tortuous allure of soul searching in “Un-becoming Peter Allen” at McGuffey Art Center through August 18. “Albedo” is one of the works included in Allen’s third solo show since joining McGuffey in 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

A confession: I’m not adequately prepared to discuss Peter Allen’s “Un-becoming” show at McGuffey Art Center with the level of insight both the artist and his art deserve.

I certainly spent plenty of preparatory time and afforded the exhibition my contemplative attention. No, this is just a shortcoming of my own faculties—the same dearth that surely plagues the stupefied majority of Allen’s audiences. For there exists a gap of confounding distance between the viewer and the disarmingly tight collection of striking, illuminating, and unflinching personal visions alighting the walls of the Sarah B. Smith Gallery. For seven pieces, there is much to digest and decode.

I’ll liken my feeling of ineptitude to those moments when, reading an article, you pause to look up some referenced concept with which you’re unfamiliar; then, two minutes later, you find yourself on Wikipedia reading its definition for the fifth time, starting to question if it’s actually written in English, convinced that you know less after this fruitless endeavor than when you started, and cursing yourself for having dicked around so much during formative middle school math and science classes.

This is the overwhelming effect of Allen’s brilliance in visual art and poetry. To my great satisfaction, the artist’s statement and the ideas he’s shared about his creations demonstrate profound meaning. See, for a dummy like me, it’s a little intimidating.

Allen, a McGuffey member since 2011, says that his penciled paper and canvas pieces contend with “the nature of the self and the pressures of context.” His autobiographical discoveries invite viewers to consider their own identities, too. This lofty impulse is advanced through an upcycling of public domain, commercial, and personal images, recontextualized in graphite. He then couples his visuals with hand-cut, stenciled letters on a grid, spelling out his poetry in vertical streaks without space between the lines, often mirroring itself in a backward orientation. Though difficult to read, Allen accurately notes that his texts, which harbor some likely unintentional resemblance to Gee Vaucher’s protest art for anarcho-punk band Crass, look “at once ancient and modern.”

These bi-media pieces require us to consider the meaning of the words, as well as the images. There is little doubt that a casual Friday night art crawl won’t suffice, nor will the half-buzzed gallery stroll-through that might otherwise do the job for art proffered without paired poems. This takes time. Muttering your knee-jerk Rorschach test appraisals to the person next to you won’t cut it here.

Check out the titles—even they demand explanation: “Sequela,” “Scotoma,” “Albedo,” “Anamorph.” The good news is that, for three dollars, you can get a chapbook of sorts, where conventional presentations of Allen’s poetry are served with definitions of the unfamiliar language he’s chosen for his works’ names. Honestly, his verse provides more shocking imagery than his visuals, ornamented with terrors like deformed spider parent domination, town-crushing giants from childhood, and a recurring theme of relatives performing mutilations on each other.

The sinister elements that arise in his penciled canvases are more muted: an arrogant bather tilting aggressively in the surf, the confrontational gaze of a man among a gaggle of unhappy children, a stunned Red Riding Hood scrutinizing a contented wolf dozing in her grandmother’s clothing.

The show’s first piece, “Sequela,” features a type of self-portrait bust bisected by a vertical stream of text; the subject wears an unsettling white paper mask with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. The mask itself hangs on the backside of the wall above the poem, “Vault.” The three-part text tells of wandering into a dense forest, referencing wolves and birds, animals that reappear in the aforementioned fable piece “Albedo,” and the perched bird of “Anamorph.” It’s an intricate pattern of meaning that no brief review has space enough to explore.

Viewers of Allen’s third solo McGuffey show will be taken by the explosive monochromatic beauty of “Zoetrope,” which extends across multiple panels, snaking around two walls. Allen says the idea for the work originated 40 years earlier, when as a college student, he would shoot photos on the train to New York for museum visits. It concerns his idea of time and space interacting as parts of the same illusion that obscures the viewers’ sense of location and ability to interpret what’s being observed. “Zoetrope”’s silhouettes, cloud bursts, rays of sunlight, windows, reflections, and waves of smoke make it impossible to tell.

Though Allen leaves us ample instructions for understanding his influences, ideas, and objectives, following him for the entire journey takes chutzpah. But, for those of us willing to take on the challenge, the rewards are many.