Author: Elizabeth Derby

I’m one of those people who cleans compulsively. I snap into straighten up mode when I feel overwhelmed by the number of notebooks on the sideboard, of unattended flip-flops by the door, of projects on my inexhaustible to-do list.

In my world, order reigns as a reflex—a knee-jerk to save me from drowning in chaos. But why in the world do people like me choose to fight this losing battle?

Virginia artists Felicia Brooks and Leigh Anne Chambers invite this question to the foreground of their new exhibit “A Language Must Be Found.” Curated by Isabelle Brooks, the intern at Chroma Projects, the show includes abstract paintings created over ready-made materials. In Chambers’ case, they’re pieces of vinyl flooring and other cast-offs re-imagined as exploratory art.

The director of the Rawls Museum of Art in Courtland, Virginia, Chambers writes in an e-mail interview with C-VILLE that she initially worked on unstretched canvas hung on the walls of her house, making her bright splashes of color and irregular drippings on clean backgrounds. Inspiration struck when she “wondered what would happen if I painted directly” on to the vinyl flooring she’d been using to protect her walls.

The result was a new layer of metaphor in her work, a deep dive into the utility and thoughtful consideration of social scraps. “With my art, I am interested in pushing boundaries so that the audience is challenged with the idea of looking at something that could be discarded and considering it as something more,” she writes. “For example does the work have to be presented so that it looks like a painting rather than a heap of vinyl flooring? And how much information do you have to include in a painting for it to be read as a painting?”

Brooks, a Charlottesville-based art therapist, is less inclined to push external limits than internal ones. Though her works in “A Language Must Be Found” were developed on bargain-priced Michael’s wall art, the sort of 12″x12″ canvases spray painted black and printed with messages like “Live, Laugh, Love,” she chose them not for symbolic value but rather because they were cheap and she’s a fan of recycling.

“I paint over my work all the time,” Brooks says. “If I could paint on a canvas forever, I would. I know and love everything under the layers, and they become part of [a painting’s] history.” Indeed, her work often resembles keyhole designs, with broadly brushed acrylic dissolving to show layers upon layers of movement underneath.

She shares the belief that patterns emerge through methodical process with Chambers, who writes that “I am always thinking about relationships from one element in a piece to another, for example paint that has created a marbled effect on its own versus the marks that I make intentionally against that paint. I am also thinking about my own relationships with people and ideas, and whatever I am reading or listening to musically informs the work in some way.”

If Chambers defines order as purely relational, Brooks chooses to dance with it. “After I start focusing on bringing forth the shapes and the forms by manipulating the canvas with the paint, the shapes take on a personality of their own. Like ‘You were hiding in that corner, and you were over there, so how do you relate to that one?” she says.

Both artists have pursued their craft for the majority of their lives. Chambers remembers going on a school field trip to a museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was allowed to help paint the background for an exhibit; she went on to receive both a BFA in painting and an MFA in visual art. Brooks began scribbling when she was just a young girl, and her identity as an artist anchored her throughout school.

Brooks describes how painting has become “a form of meditation. It’s a way to help me connect with myself on a much deeper level. It’s a way to stay grounded and present and also to get outside of myself because I’m working with whatever form presents itself through the act of painting.”

The instinct to find order in chaos is a deeply human need, a longing we attempt to satiate with the taxonomies of science and the tenants of faith. On her website, Chambers explains that her process turns on “George Bataille’s idea of formless,” a notion that “describes the need to give form to everything in order to make it comprehensible.”

She remembers her own young instincts as she attempted to order her world: “I had an art teacher in high school that did not match his plaids when he dressed. I still remember that and wondered why he just did not get it together.”

Most of us want to impose order on chaos to beat back the fear that life is meaningless, that we may be mortal without purpose, that we can’t or won’t make a difference. For these women, art is the answer.

Chambers no longer depends on a culturally informed construction of cleanliness. Brooks, for her part, finds ultimate power in the opposite of deliberation. “Mark making is really important to me,” she says. “Just the simple act of creating a mark on canvas can be so beautiful and so personal. It becomes your own language.”

“A Language Must be Found” is on display at Chroma Projects, 107 Vincennes Rd., through August 23.

Ever notice how many artists call attention to negative space?

The white of the canvas unobscured by paint. The breath on all sides of a published poem, each word a drop in the frame of the page. What goes unsaid. What goes unseen. The elevation of objects flying under the radar to the forefront of imagination.

In this way, artists act as the shepherds of our collective unconscious, cajoling liminal ideas into the arena of global visibility.

Tony Albert, a Girramay artist from Townsville, Queensland, Australia, uses his talent to call our attention to the questionable construction of difference—the shifting line against which we judge the insider and outsider.

It’s a subject we can’t afford to ignore, as Albert’s success testifies. Well-represented in exhibitions and collections throughout his native Australia, he won both the $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize and the prestigious $50,000 Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2014.

C-VILLE Weekly caught up with Albert by e-mail prior to the opening of his exhibition, “Brothers,” at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through August 9.

C-VILLE Weekly: Please tell us a bit about your work.

Tony Albert: As an artist I am very interested in the retelling of history and in giving a voice to those whom history has, and continues, to silence. I consider my work to be conceptually based, meaning I pick the best media to express my ideas. I work across photography, installation video, and “Aboriginalia”—a term I coined to describe kitsch Australiana with representations of Aboriginal people.

How did you come to be making political art?

I’m often asked about the politics in my work, particularly in relation to my cultural identity and how I define my art and life practice. I am undeniably political. Unfortunately, political art has a bad reputation for being overly didactic. Sometimes, also, by labeling the artwork “political,” it negates the fact that you have to talk deeply about the “political” content because its message is so clearly evident. I always try to balance the undoubted political nature of my message with an aesthetic to which contemporary art audiences can respond. I don’t wish to tell the viewer exactly how to think; rather, I want to engage him or her in a conversation, or plant a seed for thought.

What is “Brothers,” and what inspired you to create it?

“Brothers” is a series of photographic works that respond to the ongoing violence and brutality inflicted upon people of color. Shortly after relocating to Sydney in 2012 an incident occurred where police officers shot and wounded two Aboriginal teenagers who were joyriding in the city. Given our very strict gun control laws, incidents involving firearms in Australia are quite rare, even when police are involved. Whilst it was argued that the teenagers were doing the wrong thing, the excessive use of force by the police officers was never called into question. The local community was deeply angered by the situation and protests broke out spontaneously. At one of them, a number of young Aboriginal men had drawn targets over their chests. It reinforced my thoughts that as a black man, I am, we are, walking targets.

How did you choose the subjects?

The young men depicted in the photographs are all from the Kirinari Hostel—a suburban boarding facility that houses teenagers from regional communities while they attend high school in the city. The hostel is in Cronulla, a suburb in Sydney’s south. What’s interesting about the location of this hostel is that Cronulla is widely considered to be the heartland of racist, white, middle class Australia. So much so that in 2005 massive race riots broke out in the area after being instigated by the white community.

What are some of the symbols of power that you’ve layered onto these images, and why did you choose them?

I remember the Australian Prime Minister recently talking publicly about Aboriginal children cleaning up the sidewalks as a means of employment. I thought “Wow. He’s really encouraging us to reach for the stars.” I wish he had said that he believes an Aboriginal person should be the next leader of this country or that Aboriginal people should be encouraged to pursue their dreams —be superheroes, make a change. Whilst Superman can fly, a super power can also be as simple as helping other people or being kind to one another. The images and symbols I use in this work are indeed symbols of power. I want our people to feel empowered and to be portrayed as they truly are—strong, resilient, capable and proud people.

Why is “Brothers” important now?

I think the conversation “Brothers” raises has always been important, however what I would say is that right now it is urgent. Not only in Australia, but all over the world, and particularly here in the U.S., where we are witnessing horrific acts of violence being committed against African-Americans.

How do these ideas stem, more broadly, from the human condition itself?

I make art about my life and my family’s life, and the experience I touch on in “Brothers” stems from personal experience. That said, I think it is interesting that a lot of my work speaks to a universal human condition; to me racism and suffering is very much a shared experience. Despite the fact that a lot of my work addresses rather uncomfortable issues, it is always underpinned by a sense of positivity, hope and resilience.

As the newest artist-in-residence at Shenandoah National Park, documentary filmmaker Stace Carter sums up his outdoorsy side in one word: “Meh.”

A former Boy Scout, Eagle Scout and decades-long Albemarle resident, Carter says he has “a great appreciation for comfort,” and his interest in this artistic residency comes not with the chance to shoehorn backcountry hikes into an art project but rather to indulge himself in easy access to spectacular natural resources.

“This is a great chance to spend time in a place without which my life would be less,” he says. “The first time I went to Shenandoah, not long after I moved to Charlottesville, I was killing time while looking for a job and decided to head toward the mountains and see what I could find. I headed toward Skyline Drive and was blown away, and since then I’ve visited as often as possible.”

In short, Carter is like many park visitors: content to get lost in little adventures, whether that’s walking a section of the Appalachian Trail or simply wandering around for a few hours.

The everyman approach no doubt appeals to leaders of the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Program, which offers artists a chance to live and work in the park for a period of two weeks, then donate original works of art to the park.

In Carter’s case, he’ll create two two-minute videos of the people he meets in the park. “I’m hoping to capture some of the stories from visitors and park staff about how they found the park and what they’ve found in the park,” he says.

Carter will act as a story detective for his residency, living at Skyland Resort and immersing himself in the experience of the Shenandoah wild. Ultimately, his work will live with the National Park Service’s centennial celebratory campaign Find Your Park, which highlights visitor stories from across the country.

To further the goals of this campaign, Carter has been tasked with engaging the public in his work—a process that becomes him. “The park service will give me assistance in exploring,” he says. You wouldn’t think there is a behind-the-scenes to it, but there is a public safety component. I get to work with rangers to find special and relatively off-limits places, and I have no idea what I’m going to find.”

Diving into the unknown with the task of creation is the name of the game for documentary filmmakers like Carter, who got into the business as a music editor “a billion years ago.” He worked as a film writer and producer in the advertising industry, a job that was, as he puts it, “fun and big budget and spiritually unsatisfying.”

Tired of driving to and from Richmond and Washington, D.C. on a daily basis, Carter eventually became a video producer at the Darden School of Business, where he honed his behind-the-camera chops and interview skills.

He also began working with the founders of the Festival of the Photograph, helping the first LOOK3 establish its video production component. Getting to know documentary photographers like Bill Allard and Eugene Richards and see the scope of their work was life-changing.

“I was floored with how much of a story they could tell with one frame,” says Carter. “Bill does Americana and personal community stories, and Eugene does social justice stuff. I saw their work as a combination of the amazing power of art and the adventure of actually going and making it.”

Documentary captured his heart, he says, because “you’ve got to immerse yourself. You can’t just show up, snap pictures and hope you’ve got something good. You’ve got to get to know people and communities, and that takes time. That’s not an easy thing. There’s adventure rolled into the process.”

He began his own exploration in earnest when he began filming a documentary for Darden about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He flew south and spent a week working with the Coast Guard.

“That project taught me the value of expressing big ideas with small stories,” says Carter. “We met a lot of good folks who were tied up in a huge conflict. Most of the people who work the rigs fish commercially on their days off, so getting rid of Gulf drilling didn’t work for them, contrary to everything we heard in the press. Working both industries tends to be a family tradition and runs deep in the blood. It was fascinating and gratifying to find people who had a story that needed to be told and to help them tell it.”

Now he will do the same for the park he loves. “To me, Shenandoah, and the wider national park system, is a big story about our recognition of the profoundly beautiful and meaningful places that still warrant a notion of American Exceptionalism,” he said. “They tie us to the past and remind us of the importance of preserving what this land was, either hundreds or even tens of thousands of years ago.”

His research has revealed an abundance of stories even before he set foot in Skyland. “You can imagine what it must be like to work as a park ranger and know one of these most valued places so well, to have a family history that dates back before the Civilian Conservation Corps, who built this park. Small stories, big lessons.”

When Toronto-based photographer Zun Lee received his first camera, he had “zero passion or desire to do the photography stuff.”

“I was stressed and traveling all the time for work, so a coworker encouraged me to take up photography as a hobby,” Lee said in a recent interview with C-VILLE. “He sent me a camera, so I said I’d try it, but I wasn’t into it.”

Six months later, he was walking down the street when two homeless street kids approached and asked him to take their picture. At first, Lee said, he assumed they wanted money, but all they wanted was a picture—for someone to pay attention to them.

“I found myself in conversation with them for quite some time, and that started my whole practice of street photography,” he said. “The camera became a tool to get closer to strangers in the street, and it became addictive.”

Five years later, Lee still doesn’t like photography. “At least not the technical aspect,” he said. “People approach me about what kind of camera and settings I use and it bores me to tears.”

He’d rather discuss the story behind the lens—the narratives which, in Lee’s case, are widely untold in traditional media.

In his most recent photojournalism project, “Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood,” Lee focuses his lens on African-American men in intimate parenting moments with their children. The scenes reveal a variety of quiet emotions, the spectrum of fatherly love, and stand in direct contrast to the pervasive stereotype of absentee black fathers.

He’s spent the last three and a half years getting to know the father figures who don’t make news headlines—those African-American men who might not be legally married or live with their partner or kids, or “may struggle to provide on a consistent basis, but this does not automatically mean that [they are] irresponsible.”

Lee reveals the humanity of men doing their best, tending to babies and small children in strollers, at bath time, in restaurants, while crossing the street. Some photos are posed; others are candid. A girl in a striped shirt and rain boots sits in her father’s lap as he sits astride a motorcycle. A young man grins, running alongside his dad as they cross a city street. A shirtless father holds his daughter with his back to the camera, her hands grasped around his neck and smiling, eyes peeking over his broad shoulders, the thick muscle looped with tattoos.

Lee spends months getting to know his subjects, building rapport and deep connections during dinners, hanging and housework. “I’ve talked to 400 families over the last four years, and only 40 or 50 were interested enough to allow a session,” he said.

In “Father Figure,” Lee seeks to capture what he never had—the answers to deeply personal questions in his own life. In 2004, he learned that his own father was not the man his Korean mother married but an African-American man with whom she had a very brief relationship.

“I grew up in the black community anyway,” he said, “with the stereotypes of absentee black fathers. Then I became part of that narrative, which is what made it so hard for me.” He said his mother doesn’t remember his father’s name, so his work has become the only way to make sense of a complicated past.

“I can’t ask [my father] questions, but through this process of photographing families whose fathers may well have been similar to or like my own father, you’re able to step out of your own resentment and come to terms with your own history,” said Lee

The project has earned Lee national recognition. A book of his works has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and named a winner in the photo books category of the 2015 PDN Photo Annual competition.

It’s also put Lee on the receiving end of hate mail, negative comments, even death threats.

“People feel threatened,” he said. “The comments range from ‘you’re telling lies’ to ‘you found the few fathers that are actually there.’ I don’t get upset. It just tells me I am hitting a nerve, and people have beliefs that are coming out into the open.”

The negative backlash is, he said, a “bizarre” response to gentle, loving images. “I don’t think people think it’s bad, but it shakes up their worldview. I’m not hitting them over the head or attacking anyone or raising my fists. I’m just saying, ‘Look, this is what I’m observing.’”

This larger conversation has become Lee’s impetus to continue. “As much as it was about processing my personal story it was also about providing perspective on a conversation crossing the country. I wouldn’t have done it for years and years if it hadn’t been for that larger conversation.”

That conversation includes police brutality, the school to prison pipeline and the numerous unspoken stereotypes that pervade American perceptions of African-American men.

“When people talk about what we are really witnessing,” Lee said, “not just the events that are unfolding but also how the media covers them, it’s important to me to show more than what’s already out there.”

Zun Lee’s show “Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood” opens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on June 5 and runs through August 29.

The vibrant color hits you first—long swaths of it—before your brain can synthesize the spectrum as quilts, bright fabrics cut and pieced together in geometric patterns and draped against high walls and room dividers.

Then you notice the buzz—the palpable warmth of the gallery’s attendees. Three of the exhibited artists, young men in suit jackets sporting bow ties and pocket squares they’ve sewn themselves, explain the intricacies of the craft as they’ve learned it.

“All these are practice bindings,” said one student, pointing to a quilt titled “We Are Somebody,” with a solid black backing and a composition of colorful squares arranged like a 2-D robot. “When you start, you practice on a small square,” he said.

A quilter for the last two and a half years—the length of time this class has been available—he describes evolving from basic quilts made of 4″x 4″ squares to complex zigzag patterns, fusable web overlays and detailed appliqué work. (None of the quilts are formed from premade patterns.)

“When I got started I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about [quilting], but then I was like ‘Oh, I really like this.’ With each one I made I kept getting more confidence and people would tell me how nice it was, so I kept wanting to do more and try different things and test my skills.”

That’s the goal at the heart of the course: teach young men to strive to do good work that builds character and allows them to expresses the best parts of themselves.

Their beautiful, imaginative results are remarkable not only because they reveal the talent and passion of young men for a historically female-dominated craft, but because these men in particular are residents of the Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center (JCC), arguably one of the last places you’d expect to find a flourishing quilting scene.

But the 22-person program, believed to be the first quilting class ever offered in a male juvenile correctional center, is indeed flourishing—so much so that the directors plan to double its size and hire current part-time instructor Roy Mitchell on as a full-time staff member.

“My first comment to these individuals when they enter my classroom is that it doesn’t matter what they did, it matters what they do. It’s not where you’ve been, it’s where you’re going. In my class, you are somebody,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell is a nationally recognized quilter who radiates patience and positivity. The first African-American male to be featured in National Quilting Association magazine, he’s known as The Watermelun Man for his collection of quilts featuring “watermelun babies,” sweet characters modeled off black memorabilia and posed with watermelons to “show a positive link between my African-American culture and watermelon,” according to his website.

Mitchell began his own practice of quilting in 1990, when he went with his girlfriend to a state fair in Manassas and balked at the price of a quilt she admired. “I said ‘There’s no way I’ll pay for that.’ I called it a blanket, not knowing how much detail and preparing and planning the colors and design and threads went into it.”

He vowed to make a quilt instead. He joined a class, created a quilt with a double wedding ring pattern, and fell in love with the craft.

“It’s always been a passion from that day,” he said, but his singular dedication began in 2004, when he met the founder of the Daughters of Dorcas & Sons, Ms. Viola Virginia Williams Canady. She became his mentor and personal champion, telling him he would teach one day and asking him to keep the dream alive. Everything she said came true.

As a teacher at JCC, “I’m fulfilling her dream, and these young men are keeping the art alive,” he said.

Mitchell’s students have made and given away over 100 quilts to groups in need, including members of the local homeless population, McGuire Veterans Hospital and Culpeper and Richmond cancer centers. He often takes pictures of the presentation so his students can see where their handiwork lands.

He said that six students from his class have already been released from JCC and are still quilting. One of them joined a quilt guild so he could collect scraps and start his own quilting business, Scrap Quilts.

Lots of students vow to continue the craft once they leave JCC. “I always tell them we’ll meet again in different circumstances and quilt together on the outside,” Mitchell said.

In truth, this exhibit—this room of colorful quilts—represents so much more. It’s the foundation for something that echoes the process Mitchell described in his own work as a quilter.

“I love being able to take something that was a small, plain piece of fabric and make it grow so big,” he said. “The more you get into it, the more you see you can never really finish. I tell my students there is a beginning, a middle and a continuation. You can always learn more.”

The show “We Are Somebody,” featuring work from beginning, intermediate and advanced JCC quilting classes, stopped at The Bridge PAI on an eight-state tour. It showed in Flint, Michigan en route to Charlottesville, and on May 26 it made its way to California.