Author: Elizabeth Derby

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Arts

Matthew McLendon wants more at The Fralin

New director and curator Matthew McLendon is assessing the role that UVA’s Fralin Museum will play beyond Grounds. “What I can say is that I want The Fralin to be a positive space where all feel welcome, heard and appreciated,” he says. “I want The Fralin to be a part of many communities. This is what I’m thinking about and this is what I’m working toward.” Photo by Amy Jackson

In January, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia welcomed a director and chief curator, Matthew McLendon, formerly with Tate Britain in London, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College and The Ringling Museum of Art, the state art museum of Florida.

While McLendon worked at The Ringling, the art blogazine Hyperallergic named his show “R. Luke DuBois—Now” one of the top 15 exhibitions in the United States. “For me, the most successful exhibitions are ones that pose questions and possibilities for further thought, that leave me wanting more,” McLendon writes in an email. “There is only so much visual information any of us can process in a concentrated setting.”

McLendon’s appreciation of the dynamic relationship between artwork and viewer also informs his vision for The Fralin in its community.

“One of the things I’ve realized is that a lot of people outside of UVA think of us as only the university’s museum. Our mission certainly is to serve the students, faculty and staff of UVA, but we are Charlottesville’s art museum, too,” he says. “I’m excited about a collaboration starting this month with the Violet Crown Cinema—The Fralin Downtown Film Series. We’ll be showing six documentaries on art, architecture and artists in the fall and spring, starting on September 12.”

Even as the museum expands its offerings beyond Grounds, McLendon grapples with the influence and import of recent violence on The Fralin’s future.

“I believe in the museum as steward of histories and cultures so that we understand the best, and also the worst, that we are capable of as people,” he says.

“Museums can and should provide the historical and human contexts that are woefully absent in most public discourse today. I believe that museums, even with their contested histories, can and should be places of civil discourse. We certainly have not been perfect in the past, but this ideal should be our constant goal.”

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Arts

Blake Hurt plays with perspective in two collections

Now through August 26, see “August Persons” at Chroma Projects, and view “Steampunk Ink Collages” at the PCA Gallery next door. Join Blake Hurt for an artist’s talk and reception on August 20. Courtesy of the artist

Charlottesville is a cozy little city. Most of the time, we know our neighbors—enough to recognize their kids or their pets, maybe catch snippets about their lives at work or play.

But what if the guy down the street turned out to be the commander of an invading fleet of warships? Or the girl next door is actually the leader of an entire army?

It sounds fantastical, but few of us know where authority comes from—or if we could spot it in street clothes.

Local artist Blake Hurt explores this human propensity to fill in the blanks by creating portraits not with photorealistic accuracy but with an assembly of unexpected artifacts and symbols. In this way, he renders family, friends and familiar members of the Charlottesville community wholly new.

His current show includes two bodies of work in two separate galleries. The PCA Gallery features “Steampunk Ink Collages,” a collection of large-scale digital portraits, while Chroma Projects is exhibiting “August Persons,” a collection of watercolor portraits laced with outrageous crowns, hats and other whimsical toppers.

When he creates his mosaic-like digital portraits, Hurt uses a computer program to deconstruct and rebuild faces with components that reflect the accomplishments or interests of his subjects. In the past, his digital works included a portrait of Charlottesville’s former mayor Satyendra Huja blended from a street map of the city, and a portrait composed from visual soundwave renderings from an audio recording of a friend’s voice.

In “Steampunk Ink Collages,” he took inspiration from Modern Locomotive Construction, an early 19th-century engineering book that is chock-full of technical illustrations of locomotive machinery and design. Hurt used these hand-drawn illustrations as facial components, overlaying and combining them to reveal the sitter of each portrait.

Hurt explains in his artist’s statement, “The recognition of the whole is controlled by where the viewer of the picture stands. If you stand close to one of the digital pictures, you see only the individual drawings; if you stand far away, you see the image of the face.”

In “August Persons,” Hurt creates faces using the more traditional dashes and blots of watercolor paints—then takes it up a notch.

Hurt knew he wanted to elevate the conversation around his watercolor portraits from a comparison of strict likeness to actual content. Inspired by a picture of the marriage ceremony of Czar and Czarina Nicholas and Alexandra, he began adding crowns to his subjects, hoping that “rather than asking if it was a good likeness, people would ask, ‘Who is this person that has such a big hat?’”

Hurt’s hats are composed from elements of his 19th-century engineering drawings but echo the remarkable range of real-life headgear worn through the ages.

“I think of these hats as regalia, signatories of authority, a long history of accumulated power,” Hurt says. “You wear them because they have meaning. Your great-grandfather defeated some country, and that doodad on the right is the finger of the defeated foe.”

Think, he suggests, of the guards in front of Buckingham Palace. “They’ve got columns of hair two feet high with doodads on the front. These hats are signifiers of position, of membership to an elite group.”

Hurt considered writing a backstory for each of his subjects in “August Persons,” since most visitors will not recognize his portraits. But in the end, he decided to let the headgear speak for itself.

“It’s not that these people have unusual authority, but it could be,” Hurt says. “These portraits are starting points for imagination. They’re a reflection of how ordinary people can show up in extraordinary circumstances.”

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Arts

Face time: Painter Caroline Nelson gets personal with her subjects

Caroline Nelson’s large-scale portraits are on display at WriterHouse through August 31. Photo courtesy of the subject.

For fine artist Caroline Nelson, a person’s face speaks volumes.

“The smallest details, the wrinkles and the pores, are very telling,” she says. “There are people who I see and I immediately want to paint them. It can be their eyes or their skin tone, but there’s always something that I’m drawn to.”

Her large-scale portraits, currently on display at WriterHouse through August 31, feature luminous eyes, vibrant skin and shadows, people whose faces are splashed by water (and whose expressions are, frankly, priceless).

“I love doing faces because I see them as someone’s identity,” she says. “I’ve never been drawn to doing landscapes or abstract works because a face can tell you so much without reading anything about it.”

Though she’s only a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Nelson has been creating oil paintings for the last five years. She spent years painting her family members. “I am one of six siblings, so I have a lot to choose from,” she says. “Plus, my family was accessible. Like, ‘I’m going to splash you in the face with water, and you have to deal with it because you’re family and it’s for art.’”

Now a double major in sculpture and extended media and painting and printmaking at VCU, Nelson explores different methods of art making, though her work tends to revolve around realism and the richness and vibrancy of oil paint.

“I love the texture [of oil]. You can use varnish and glazes and make it really smooth. You can go as thick as you want. You can have that look that Leonardo da Vinci got because as it builds up, it looks like it’s glowing,” she says. “I have paintings that won’t dry for three months because I’ve laid it on so thick.”

In addition to experimentation in her studio, Nelson learns about glazing and layering as a decorative artist with Warnock Studio in Richmond, an ornamental painting studio that creates home murals and paintings on marble. She also researches classical art techniques, drawing from Rococo and Baroque styles to complement the contemporary training she receives at VCU.

These days, she’s focused on expressing personality through portraiture.

“People who have distinct life experiences, and it can show on their faces. Maybe they have dark times in their lives, and my work can reflect that,” she says. Describing “Maddie II,” a portrait of her older sister, she explains her choice of a dramatic light change to highlight the duality of human personality.

“[‘Maddie II’] isn’t specifically about the subject,” Nelson says. “Her face is really expressionless, which is what I wanted to go for. I wanted the color and tone to speak for itself. Because there’s a side to your face most people don’t see, a very vulnerable dark side that is typically hidden. It’s common for people to smile instead of opening up and expressing how they really feel.”

She considers it “a huge privilege” to be able to capture someone’s identity on canvas.

“I am in awe of people who say, ‘You can paint a picture of me and show every blemish.’ That takes courage,” she says. “I never want to paint myself. Portraits are a way for me to express myself through other people.”

Nelson says she’s really comfortable with some parts of herself—and not so much with others. After all, she points out, “I’m still trying to find myself. I’m only a sophomore in college.”

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Les Yeux du Monde features six artists in a radiant summer show

"Flatscape III," Cate West Zahl. “Summer Perspectives” and “More Light” are at Les Yeux du Monde through August 20.

Every sunny morning during the summertime, I wake up and stare at the light-soaked leaves outside my window and feel a rush of joy. At a time when most of us could stand a bit of brightness, the sun showers us with one of the happiest forces on earth.

Nature’s hot-weather celebration is the subject of two exhibitions currently on display at Les Yeux de Monde. “Summer Perspectives” and “More Light” each showcase three artists whose complementary works reveal radiance in the abstract.

Isabelle Abbot, who shares “Summer Perspectives” with Sarah Boyts Yoder and Cate West Zahl, explores micro and macro landscapes. In an email, she writes, “Typically, I paint the long view, trying to capture the depth and movement of the land here in Virginia. But for this show I did several pieces that are up-close on different types of local vegetation that I think are particularly symbolic of this area.”

“What if we could see that middle space [between familiarity and strangeness] as joyful and open rather than as a frustration? If we can practice being there our imaginations expand, empathy grows. That’s the point of all art.” Sarah Boyts Yoder

For Yoder, the creation of ambiguous and painterly abstract works is an opportunity to expand not just our understanding of place but our reaction to unfamiliar experience. She writes: “What if we could see that middle space [between familiarity and strangeness] as joyful and open rather than as a frustration? As a place to relax, look around, ask questions, make connections with each other and ourselves? If we can practice being there our imaginations expand, empathy grows. That’s the point of all art.”

Zahl explains that she does not intentionally explore greater meaning in her whimsical, linear works. She focuses on the process as a form of problem solving, in this case taking inspiration from photos of Oklahoma farmland regions taken from airplanes. “I liked the delineations of land and flatness of these aerial views,” she writes. “The paintings are called ‘flatscapes.’”

“Then the Orchards Bloomed,” Isabelle Abbot

In “More Light,” Karen Blair seeks to share the “sheer awe” she feels when she looks at the world. By choosing to distill local landscapes into shapes, marks and colors, “it becomes a challenge to give more to the viewer than just a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene,” she writes. “What about wind, heat and cold, birdsong and the taste of iron filings on the tongue in heavy fog? I constantly search for ways to infuse the paintings with this information.”

If Blair seeks to create an emotional impact, Argentina native Ana Rendich paints to extrapolate her own. Her bright, vivid work in “More Light” focuses on concepts such as sanctuary, social change and the never-ending pursuit of happiness.

“I create works to see a better world,” Rendich writes. She says that musing on the human condition helps her connect to hope, history, the environment, God and the goodness of man.

“The Jungle Over the Wall,” Sarah Boyts Yoder

Moving from universal themes to hyper-local scenes, “More Light” includes contributions from Krista Townsend, whose paintings feature familiar spots like the Saunders-Monticello Trail and the Blue Ridge Mountains near Batesville. Ultimately, she writes, “I am trying to capture a sense of place, but the place as I experienced it.”

Townsend, too, considers art-making to be a meditative, therapeutic process. “I paint what I see and feel,” she writes. Immersing herself in inspirational places, she absorbs the movement and color and light of the moment.

“I get to do what I love and I get to reexamine the places that inspired me,” she writes. And, as local art-viewers likewise discover, “I often find things I hadn’t noticed when I was there.”

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Stefan Bechtel’s new book inspects the Conan Doyle conundrum

Stefan Bechtel’s Through a Glass, Darkly chronicles Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life pursuit of spiritualism, an early 20th century movement that promoted contact with the afterlife. Photo courtesy of the subject

For Charlottesville-based author Stefan Bechtel, mystery is the essence of life.

“I grew up in Chicago, in the white-bread suburbs where every lawn was perfect. But way out on the edge of town there was a swamp. Lincoln Swamp,” Bechtel says. “We would ride our bikes all the way out to Lincoln Swamp, and we basically raised ourselves there. It was mysterious and alive, the strange and incredible all wrapped in one. It was kind of our religion.”

Now, with a dozen books and countless articles under his belt, the writer explains that the truism “write what you know” doesn’t really suit him. He quotes David McCullough when he says, “‘I want to write about what I don’t know.’”

The thrill of exploration—and sharing his discoveries—is the fuel that powers Bechtel’s work, which has appeared in 10 languages and publications such as Esquire and the Washington Post.

After graduating from the University of Miami with a degree in journalism, he worked at newspapers and magazines. While working for Rodale Press as a senior editor for Prevention magazine, Bechtel and his boss, Mark Bricklin, struck gold by creating a monthly newsletter called Men’s Health. That newsletter went on to become the largest men’s magazine brand in the world.

But it wasn’t until Bechtel got his first book contract with HarperCollins, while taking a leave of absence from Rodale, that he discovered his true calling.

“I remember, when I finished that first book, walking around the block probably 50 times,” he says. “I was just so high, so excited that I had done something I knew was good, and that I was going to be able to share this terrific story with people.”

That story began many years earlier, when Bechtel worked at a small city magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina. Out of the blue, he got a call from a woman who described unusual phenomena in her home, “like, she’d walk into a room and the fire would be going in the fireplace, but she had no memory of putting the fire there.”

His curiosity piqued, Bechtel joined the woman as she worked with Duke University researchers to investigate a potential haunting in her home. The results of that research were inconclusive—and so was Bechtel’s article.

But several years later, he received another call. This time, the woman, Kit Castle, had a definitive answer to the mystery.

“She said, ‘I been working with a psychiatrist, and it turns out I’m a multiple personality,’” says Bechtel. “‘And my spirit guide, Michael, asked me if you’d be going to write a book about me and what’s going on.’”

After checking with Castle’s doctor, psychiatrist and ex-husband, Bechtel dove back into the story, fell in love with the process, and Katherine, It’s Time: The Incredible Journey into the World of a Multiple Personality was published in 1989.

“It’s beyond exciting,” says Bechtel. “To be taken out of my life completely and confronted with something that’s utterly confounding and thrilling, because you can’t understand it. That’s writerly bliss.”

Since then, Bechtel has authored or co-authored 12 books, which have collectively sold more than 2 million copies. But writing books for a living hasn’t been the easiest path. His latest novel, Through a Glass, Darkly, spent five years gestating as a 13,000-word book proposal before St. Martin’s Press picked it up.

His latest project gave him a chance to re-engage with “the mysterious, the inexplicable. Not sci-fi or horror, but the uneasiness of something that doesn’t really make sense to the rational mind.”

This time, Bechtel’s search focused on the transformation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a shift he offhandedly calls the “Conan Doyle conundrum.”

After becoming famous as the creator of hyper-rational sleuth Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle transformed into a (widely ridiculed) champion of spiritualism, a kind of do-it-yourself religion wherein the living communicate with the dead.

“[It was] this crazy mania that swept across the United States and Europe,” Bechtel says. “In the 1920s, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were actually competing to develop a machine called the ghost machine, which would discover the precise electrical frequency that would allow people to communicate directly with the spirit world. That’s how big it was.”

Bechtel and his co-author, Laurence Roy Stains, spent months researching historical records of trance mediums and séances, following Conan Doyle’s trail. “He read very widely and had come to his beliefs pretty cautiously,” Bechtel says. “He had hope that spiritualism would become the world’s first scientific religion, based on demonstrable facts and not on faith.”

Because in those days, Bechtel says, the theological war was a fight between the materialists and the spiritualists, the materialists being “the super scientific people who had reduced human life to four bags of water and a sack of salt.” And Conan Doyle “wanted to believe in magic. He wanted the world to be filled with mystery. And he felt like the materialists were completely ignoring or blocking that out.”

In this way, Bechtel echoes his subject from Through a Glass, Darkly.

“I love things that confound the rational mind. I love the creepy series of coincidences,” he says. “Our world is mysterious and wonderful. And if you lose sight of that, I think you might as well be dead.”

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Chroma’s ‘Nesting Materials’ has an elegant science at its center

Suzanne Stryk’s “Nesting Materials” is on view at Chroma Projects through May 27. Courtesy of the artist

Local artist Suzanne Stryk has always been fascinated by nests.

“When I was 8, I loved to page through a Little Golden book, The Wonder Book of Birds. And then in fourth grade, my grandmother gave me Wonders in Your Own Backyard for Christmas,” writes Stryk in her artist’s statement.

“I never outgrew the ideas in those books—birds and wonder, going on nearly six decades now. I’m still awed by watching a bird construct a nest. A single feather—nothing could be more astonishing. And how do tiny coils in a bird’s DNA code its ability to navigate by the stars?”

‘Nesting Materials’
On display through May 27
Chroma Projects

A Chicago native who minored in biology and once worked as a scientific illustrator, Stryk is known for conceptual paintings that highlight the natural world. Her latest exhibit at Chroma Projects, “Nesting Materials,” focuses entirely on birds and—you guessed it—their nests.

“It’s not just birds’ nests as they are,” Stryk says. “It’s also our response to nests and birds and the natural world in general. The idea of nest building relates to our wish for security, for constructing things, for organizing and many layers of our personal experience.”

“I’m fascinated by the cross-pollination of two unrelated things. You put sheet music and birds together and it makes a new thing, a kind of dialogue between nature and culture.”  Suzanne Stryk

She invites viewers to dig into their own ideas by painting, sculpting and constructing nests from unusual materials. (“Doing so makes me all the more impressed that birds can build them without hands!” she says.)

In “Nesting Materials” one nest is made entirely of sheet music. Another is composed of strands from the avian genome.

“I’m fascinated by the cross-pollination of two unrelated things,” Stryk says. “You put sheet music and birds together and it makes a new thing, a kind of dialogue between nature and culture. And that could lead your thoughts anywhere.”

While encouraging viewers to make their own meaning, she often returns to favorite symbols, like genomes.

“I started with the DNA double helix in the ’90s, when I became fascinated with genetics as the nonfiction myth of our time,” she says. “I’m told by science that there’s an invisible genetic code behind the way birds look and behave, and the way I look and behave. You can kind of get genetics as coding the way something looks, but behavior like nest building and migration, it’s astonishing.”

Speaking of impulses, Stryk says she’s noticed a pattern among people who view her work: Nearly everyone is attracted to vortexes.

“A vortex is a kind of a spiral, and a nest is a kind of vortex. Many people can’t explain why they’re so attracted to them, but I have a hunch,” she says.

“As a shape, the vortex has a lot of movement, a lot of variety, and the sense that it’s going around like a cyclone. And yet it’s centered in a stable form. I think that that’s what we strive for in life: lively movement, and yet we want to be centered and stable.”

That’s also where the exploration of nests has led Stryk as an artist. Her thematically consistent body of work opens the door to reveal the mysteries inherent in what we think we know.

“I want to reveal the mysteries that are,” she says. “Because no matter how far we go scientifically, there are always unanswerable things out there. Science explains so much, but it doesn’t explain the why.”

Nor can science explain concepts like beauty and our need to connect with something deep and much bigger than us.

“Art is all the more important when it illuminates science and the natural world for us,” Stryk says. “Because so many of us are left cold by data. I mean, it’s very interesting, it’s very important. I can look at a genetic sequence and say, ‘Oh my God, this shows that life is all made up of the same things, like the Taoists said 2,000 years ago,’ but you know. Most people need a story to garner metaphorical meaning from things.”

That’s how a painting of a nest becomes a tool not just for exploration but activism and preservation of the things that matter most.

“Art gives us a story,” Stryk says. “When art connects to scientific data, when art connects to nature, we respond to it personally. And if we respond to it personally, it becomes much more important to us.”

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Theater Review: The Realistic Joneses at Live Arts

The Realistic Joneses relies on a cast that can convey the authenticity of human interaction—ranging from hilarious one-liners and abrupt observations to the meaning behind half-formed compliments. Photo by Will Kerner

There’s something a bit off about The Realistic Joneses.

“Maybe it’s me,” you think at first. You’re sitting so close to the middle-aged couple you’re practically on top of them. She’s talking about the beauty of the night air and the owl she can hear in the distance. He’s staring down at hands twisted together, harrumphing with irritation. It’s awfully intimate, the way you’re hovering in other people’s tension.

But you’re in a theater and you’ve paid to watch this, so that’s exactly what you do: eavesdrop on the world’s most realistic conversation and try not to squirm with discomfort.

The Realistic Joneses
Live Arts
Runs through May 13

Outside a small kitchen, pacing a small AstroTurf lawn, she tosses up conversational softballs and he smacks them down with frustration.

“Maybe we should paint the house,” says Misses.

“Why?” Mister asks. “Won’t we just have to paint it again after that?”

His logic is silly, childish, perfect. Once you start laughing, it’s hard to stop.

You realize this curmudgeon is inadvertently funny. You also find out that he’s sick.

His wife hints at something serious and confusing, but he refuses to talk about it. You see her repressing her own frustration, but she refuses to talk about that.

The night air may be lovely, but it’s also tense. That’s why your heart jumps (as do Misses and Mister) when a muffled crash sounds from offstage.

Could it be a strange animal? A prowler? A plot twist? You pray for something to break the soupy, suburban stillness.

That’s when a young couple appears, offering a bottle of wine. As they introduce themselves as new neighbors John and Pony Jones, you learn Mister and Misses are named Bob and Jennifer Jones. Four Joneses, one neighborhood. What are the odds?

At this point, the dialogue starts throwing off sparks, hilarious one-liners and abrupt observations, and you finally realize what felt off at first. It’s like watching a play about real people, all of whom are a little bit weird.

You’ve stepped into an alternate universe populated by strangers, but they all feel so damn familiar. You’re listening to non-sequitur dialogue, but it mirrors the scattershot logic of your brain. The Realistic Joneses is realistic, yes; it’s a human, authentic comedy, but it’s also borderline absurd.

Welcome to the wild world of Will Eno, the playwright who penned Joneses in 2014. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Eno is known for his unique brand of comedy, which turns on quirky, true-to-life conversation.

Fran Smith, the director of Live Arts’ version of Joneses, certainly had her work cut out for her. A play like this depends on timing, nuance and actors who can take their cues apropos of nothing.

To her credit, Smith gives her audience a world that ought to do Eno proud. She’s given her actors room to play, to deepen their characters and develop unscripted backstories that rush into the silence between sentences. Like the simple but effective set pieces, we understand how a half-formed compliment or bad joke conveys discomfort, or longing, or lust.

The Realistic Joneses can be described as a series of short sketches happening in chronological order. Each sketch features a few (or all) of the same four characters. Time is progressing, and a plot is unfolding, but it rambles and hints rather than progressing in strong, linear strokes.

For that reason, perhaps, I found myself getting impatient somewhere in the first act. More thematic development! More narrative clarity! Show me some progress and make me care!

Beneath my brain’s demands, however, I recognized Eno’s integrity. This show is committed to authentic patterns of human behavior. I couldn’t fairly demand a cinematic character breakthrough every time someone cleaned the kitchen.

By the second act, though, I was fully invested. I saw glimpses of depth in each of the characters, I craved resolution to unfolding mysteries, and I definitely wanted to laugh some more.

In fact, the actors deserve applause for bringing this show to life. In the wrong hands, I’m sure it could easily be rendered unwatchable, but Live Arts’ version was actually fun. 

I loved Jack Walker’s manic take on John Jones, the young, doting husband full of quirks and secrets. He embraced his character’s most unusual brain, hardening with anger, softening with pain, and delivered one-liners with total conviction. (My personal favorite: “I saw you crying and eating a PowerBar, and I thought, ‘Wow. That is one sad, busy person.’”)

Adrienne Oliver plays Pony Jones, a germophobe who tends to avoid thinking too hard about the hard stuff. She warms her character’s self-centered behavior with earnest sweetness and flickers of self-doubt, holding fast to the good in herself and others despite any evidence to the contrary.

Jennifer Jones is the long-suffering wife who gives up her job and her travel dreams to become a full-time caregiver. Kate Adamson manages to express the full range of her character’s tangled emotions—frustration, tenderness, outrage and resignation—often in just a few sentences.

Bill LeSueur (C-VILLE Weekly’s creative director) plays Bob, who looks at his own mortality sideways. Bob joins us closed off, self-centered and awkward, but LeSueur’s blossoming across two acts was incredibly satisfying.

Lucky, because The Realistic Joneses isn’t the sort of play that gives you a satisfying ending. It’s not unhappy or frustrating, I’m pleased to say, but it doesn’t wrap up with a neat little bow.

It’s like life, after all. Most chapters don’t end with a scripted flourish and a heroic kiss. It’s more like an unsung conversation or the hoot of an owl, a moment that passes without our awareness and appears only in hindsight how whole and human it was.

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Victory Hall Opera vocalizes the gay experience in Ghost House

William Ferguson and Brenda Patterson and tackle traditional opera from a gay perspective in Ghost House, an updated version of Robert Schumann’s song cycles. Publicity photo

At Juilliard, up-and-coming opera singers learn the art of method acting: channeling their personal experience into the emotions they express on stage. But for mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson, the acting never stopped. “As a gay person, that’s sort of what you feel like you are doing a lot of the time in real life. You are translating the culture around you into something that speaks to you. After a while, it becomes just sort of wearying,” she says.

Unfortunately, traditional opera doubles this onus on its performers. “We were taught [at Juilliard] you change the gender of pronouns in songs. If I’m a woman, I have to always be singing to a man, and vice versa,” she says. “There are extremely few actual gay characters in opera or song. Really. Like, count them on one finger or so.” But Victory Hall Opera is changing the numbers with Ghost House, a reimagining of Robert Schumann’s famous song cycles.

“I’ve never played a lesbian on stage. I’ve never openly sung to a woman. I’ve been out my whole life, but to come out as a singer—to just fully be yourself without any sort of protective shield of any kind—it’s a very good thing. It is also a little bit scary.” Brenda Patterson

As tenor William Ferguson, accompanied by pianist Renate Rohlfing, performs Schumann’s Dichterliebe (“Poet Love”), actors will recreate seminal moments from the singer’s childhood and adolescence—when he was a boy coming to terms with his gayness in a conservative Southern household.

In the second song cycle of Ghost House, Patterson will accompany herself on piano and perform Schumann’s classic Frauenliebe und -leben (“A Woman’s Love and Life”) set with new texts by contemporary lesbian poet Emily Moore. Ferguson and Patterson graduated from Juilliard, and both won the prestigious Alice Tully Debut Recital competition. Now, 15 years later, their paths have crossed at VHO.

“Will Ferguson is like the Ellen of opera,” Patterson says, “because he was the first singer I knew to sort of come out on stage. At his Alice Tully debut recital, he sang these contemporary love songs, and they were to a man. I had never heard any other singer do that up till that point.”

Though the single performance of Ghost House is currently sold out, you can see Victory Hall Opera’s newest show, Oracle, on April 12 at Old Metropolitan Hall.

For her part, Patterson says “I’ve never played a lesbian on stage. I’ve never openly sung to a woman. I’ve been out my whole life, but to come out as a singer—to just fully be yourself without any sort of protective shield of any kind—it’s a very good thing. It is also a little bit scary.”

Adding to the intimacy of the performance, Ghost House will debut in a private home. “It’s like the house is the singer and the ghosts are the singer’s memories, or the singer’s subconscious,” Patterson says. “So when an audience member comes into this home, it’s almost like you’re entering the singer’s subconscious.”

This invitation to a visceral audience experience is highly intentional.“[At Victory Hall Opera], we are always looking for ways to not just present the audience with something but to really invite people into the process and the singer’s perspective,” Patterson says. “So that they feel like they are experiencing the spark of creation in that moment.” In fact, she says, Ghost House is less about upending the gay and lesbian experience and more about “finding your inner truth as an artist, and channeling that and openly sharing that with an audience.”

Such reading, she says, shows contemporary audiences that “this music can be fully embodied into a modern person, and into the modern world. It’s not some period piece.”

Though both of her song cycles were written in 1840, Patterson believes the music transcends its time. The only roadblock to contemporary appreciation is the “maudlin poetry” of the original. Schumann’s original German version, she says, is “something even straight women don’t enjoy singing now, because there are lines in it like, ‘Oh I bow down to you, my husband, and serve you in humility.’ You know what I mean?” she adds. “It’s kind of horrible.”

Rather than bow down to that particular tradition, Patterson decided to give the composer’s transcendent music new text. “I thought, ‘Okay, what is my story as a contemporary lesbian woman? What story would I want to tell about my life and love?’” She turned to her friend and accomplished lyrical poet Moore, who writes rhythmic poetry about the lesbian experience, for inspiration.

“[Moore] gave me poems she had already written, and I fit them to the music,” says Patterson. “They fit remarkably well. I’m now convinced that this is actually the original version, the real version of the song cycle. It feels much truer to me.”

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Arts

Kevin Everson looks to the night sky for comment on history

Kevin Everson’s “Rough and Unequal” is on exhibit at The Fralin Museum of Art through April 16. His work is also featured in the Whitney Biennial 2017 that begins on March 17. Image courtesy of the artist

It’s a busy, blustery Tuesday on Grounds. Outside The Fralin Museum of Art, UVA students rush by in droves, pulling overcoats tight against the wind. Inside, I stand in darkness staring at craters on the moon. The air is hot and loud, filled by the whir and clank of unsteady projectors shining on gallery walls. Two films, shot on 16mm, broadcast two different sides of the moon.

In one, darkness moves slowly across lumps and pockmarks on a surface the color of aged newspaper. Shadows appear as the moon rotates slowly; when the craters vanish, I feel lost in space. In another, the moon looks like black-and-white fuzz, a dim shadowscape making slow, creeping passage. I’d believe you if you told me the inarticulate surface was a tree trunk or dimpled thigh. Like slow-moving paintings, these films manage to simultaneously abstract the meaning of a simple subject while bridging a gap of 238,900 miles.

That’s the magic of celebrated filmmaker and UVA professor Kevin Everson. He’s known for making experimental films, many of which are shot on single rolls of 16mm film, and most of which depict working-class African-Americans in everyday situations.

As the artist’s website explains, “The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working-class African-Americans and other people of African descent.” Those inciting conditions, the website continues, are “usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather.”

Everson captures real life—unsung, unvarnished, mostly unscripted—and extrapolates it through the tactile trappings of film.

“You know, I’m a trained photographer, sculptor, printmaker and all that kind of stuff,” Everson says. “I like the materialities of art-making.” He explains that his average point of departure is “something that will last 11 minutes”—the length of a 400′ magazine of 16mm film. Then he abstracts his subjects. “It’s the whole idea of these things becoming two dimensional, like paintings, and changing every second the way films change—slowly.”

With eight feature-length films and more than 120 shorts to his name, Everson’s award-winning work has earned him Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and elsewhere. Everson rarely exhibits his work in Charlottesville outside the annual Virginia Film Festival. But in the fall of 2015, The Fralin commissioned Everson to create something new.

“I didn’t want to put African-Americans up on the wall,” he says. “I wanted to use what the university had to make a film with. So the film could only be made with an object that was on campus. And thinking about the history of [this place], I basically wanted to turn my back on the university. And just look up.”

Inspired by a former student, Everson decided to use UVA’s McCormick Observatory telescope and film the moon. He built a specific camera for the task, spending many long nights staring at the stars. The process itself took more than a year, accounting for weather, humidity and the fact that he only shot during quarter- and half-moon phases. The title of the resulting exhibition, “Rough and Unequal,” comes from Galileo’s description of the moon, he says, “which is probably the description of the university’s relationship to people of color since its inception.”

As a formalist, he says, he keeps his film concepts simple, emphasizing instead how art is made. Because “I like taking a view of things we don’t see,” Everson says. “Seeing the moon is amazing. Seeing it up close is an experience I want people to have. Like, we are not alone.” He laughs. “As Americans we are very self-centered,” he says. “And there are tons of hierarchies: culture, race, religion and class.”

“Rough and Unequal” reminds us that we are just individual blips in the universe. “We see the moon every night, but once you get close to it, you’re like, ‘Man, that’s the real deal,” he says.

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Arts

Stories of how failures lead to successes

Explore The Art of Failure with Devon Sproule (pictured), Lulu Miller and David Zahl at Meade Hall on March 6. Photo by Amelia Schmid

As consumers, we’re inundated by success. Hit records, blockbuster movies, the latest app.

Creators, on the other hand, are surrounded by failures. They churn out ideas—some brilliant, some bad—and create until something sticks.

How do they find the guts to fail their way to success? Three accomplished local artists are opening up in The Art of Failure, from The Makers Series co-hosted by Christ Episcopal Church, The Garage and New City Arts Initiative.

For musician Devon Sproule, failure is an invitation to stop scrambling so quickly.

“Trying to be successful in the music business is like trying to climb a never-ending ladder,” she says an e-mail. “You’re so busy trying to get to the next rung that it’s really hard to remember to stop and appreciate the view. There are people ahead of you that you assume have a better view, and there are people behind you that want yours. And the whole dang ladder is really rickety.”

She describes the summer of 2007 as a turning point, when she got sick—right before her appearance on the English TV show Later… with Jools Holland. “So even though this show introduced my music to a shitload of people, for the next few years, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d been at 100 percent,” she says. “Who knows, maybe my ladder-climbing would have accelerated even more, like it did for those annoyingly cute guys in Vampire Weekend, who also played that night.”

Author, editor and preacher David Zahl sees failure as the gateway to grace.

“The first five years of my own serious creative endeavor was one massive lesson in the pointlessness of trying to ‘get it right,’” he writes. “Failure is seldom something you can go around—you have to go through, even when every fiber of your being is saying not to.”

He describes hosting a conference in Pensacola, Florida, in the early years of his organization, Mockingbird. “We had planned for 200 people to register but only 24 could be bothered. It was super embarrassing, and we almost canceled ahead of time. I wasn’t even there, ’cause my wife had just had a baby. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel on this entire project.’”

But that single “failed” conference led to the start of Mockingbird’s quarterly magazine, ongoing video production and best-selling publication.

“Contrary to my default psychology and much to my relief, [failure] has never proved to be the end of the world,” he writes.

Writer, reporter and co-host of NPR’s “Invisibilia,” Lulu Miller’s commitment to art requires falling off that ladder—a lot.

“The first draft of my first radio story was such a mess it was met with the words, ‘You could never make it in a newsroom,’” she writes. “I still remember the tears falling onto the script.”

Now, she seeks to understand why things fail. She draws a parallel to parkour, the sport of running, jumping and climbing around obstacles. “I want to try to become that fluid, that artful, that beautiful as I recalibrate a story to the edits and life thrown my way,” says Miller. “I want to be that reactive, that responsive to failure. I’m not there yet, but, man, am I trying. Every day.”

The gifts of failure are not reserved exclusively for artists. “All of us will make mistakes,” Miller says. “In life. In craft. In policy. If we can open our ears to hear why people are angry, bored, confused, not moved, then we can hear the path to making ourselves, our town and our work better. As if the negative imprint of failure is the blueprint for how to succeed.”