Categories
Arts

Down under, up above: A wealth of Indigenous Australian art comes to Charlottesville this winter

This week, something extraordinary will happen in Charlottesville: Four exhibitions of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art will open in four different venues across town, bringing the total number of such exhibitions currently on view to six. And a seventh will open in mid-February.

Having this many concurrent shows of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in one locale is an extremely rare occurrence outside of Australia, if it’s even happened at all, says Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA—the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art.

And it’s some of “the best Australian contemporary art” at that, adds Skerritt. Many of these artists have won prestigious awards, and their work is collected by some of Australia’s major museums (as well as some international celebrities, like comedian Steve Martin). We’re talking “major, heavy-hitter artists,” says Skerritt.

Taken together, these exhibitions give a broad view of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Artists of many distinct language groups (of which there are more than 250 across Australia), cultures, ages, and experience are represented. Some live and work in remote communities, others in major cities. Some work with materials and methods that have been used for thousands of years, others work with digital cameras. Their art is often political, engaging topics of identity, heritage, race, colonization, sovereignty, globalization, climate change, and resilience. At the same time, these works express a reverence for the wonder and beauty of the natural world.

Nonggirrnga Marawili’s work is on view in two shows, “The Inside World” at The Fralin Museum of Art, and “By The Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery. Photo by Pep Phelan, courtesy of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala

The shows arrive as catastrophic bush fires are still raging across the Australian continent. Bush fires are not uncommon in Australia, but the current out-of-control blazes, caused at least in part by climate change, have singed tens of millions of acres of land; at least 28 people and an estimated half a billion animals have perished.

Skerritt says that the artists exhibiting in these shows don’t live in the areas affected by the fires, but there are plenty of Indigenous Australian artists (including some former Kluge-Ruhe artists-in-residence) who do.

With that in mind, these shows present an opportunity for viewers to ruminate on land, land that is important to the lives, traditions, and art practices of all of the artists here, land that has sustained their peoples for generations, even when it was violently stolen from them—and subsequently abused—by white European colonizers.

Land is spiritually, conceptually, and physically inseparable from these artists and their practices. It is the vital artery running through these bodies of work.


Have a word

In discussing their work, many Indigenous Australian artists talk about “Country,” and “Dreaming,” two terms describing concepts that are vital to understanding all of the art in these exhibitions.

Country: A place or places that have deep significance for them and their ancestors over many thousands of years.

Dreaming: The English word “dreaming” is inadequate to explain this vast, complex concept. As described in the Kluge-Ruhe’s permanent installation, the Dreaming is a belief system, a worldview shared by many Indigenous peoples. It is “powerfully connected to individual and collective identity. Individuals are born with unbreakable ties to ancestral beings and particular places for which they are custodians.” It can “refer to the time when ancestral beings created the earth and everything in it, including people, animals, plants and features of the land.” Those beings established kin relationships, art practices, laws, ceremonies, and more. The Dreaming is not marked by Western concepts of chronological time, and these narratives “continue to be passed down through generations in painted designs, ceremonies, and songs. The continuation of these activities keeps culture strong. The Dreaming was there in the beginning, it underlies the present and shapes the future.”


“Munguyhmunguyh (Forever)”

The Rotunda Upper West Room, January 23 – April 5

“Kurdukadji Djang (Emu Dreaming),” 1991 by Bardayal Nadjamerrek AO. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Injalak Arts

Kunwinjku artist Gabriel Maralngurra was just a boy when his uncle, the artist Thompson Yulidjirri, took him over the hill to see the rock art paintings of their ancestors. For tens of thousands of years, the Kunwinjku people have painted their Dreamings on rock formations in what is now known as Western Arnhem Land, using the images to educate younger generations on their culture and history.

The sites include many, many paintings of Kunwinjku Dreamings, which go back some 40,000 years, and, as artist Joe Guymala points out, some of the paintings also include images of white people with wagons, which go back about 200 years, to the European colonization of Australia. “The old people thought, what’s this white man? They draw the rifles, shotguns, and knives that the white people brought with them,” Guymala explains.

In the early 1990s, Kunwinjku artists at the Injalak Arts and Crafts Association started painting some of these stories on paper, a more portable medium than rock, as part of a project commissioned by John W. Kluge, in partnership with the arts center.

Maralngurra was president of the Injalak center at the time, and in a letter included in the commission’s published catalog, he and Gunbalanya Community Council chairman Moses Mangiru wrote that one of the goals of the commission was to help viewers of these pieces “develop a greater understanding of Aboriginal culture, our relationship to the Dreaming, and the creation of our clan lands…it is our sincerest hope for the future.”

The commission was an important moment for these artists, says Margo Smith, the longtime director of the Kluge-Ruhe, because “with paper, the artists really had to adjust to painting on a flat surface, but it enabled them to increase their detail, and so you see the development of different styles in painting on paper that [also] included some of the standard [techniques] of rock art” painting, such as hand stencils. Artists would fill their mouths with paint, put their hands up against the rock (or in this case, paper), and blow the pigment around their hands, creating the effect of a sort of starry galaxy around the negative space hand outline.

“Ngalyod dja Ngalkunburriyaymi (Rainbow Serpent and Water Spirit),” 2018 by Joe Guymala. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts

Once the commission was over, Kunwinjku artists continued sharing their stories on paper, and to commemorate 30 years of the commission and the resulting art historical moment, five of those original 45 pieces will be on display in the West Oval Room of the Rotunda. Two brand new pieces from Maralngurra and Guymala, artists who have incorporated rock painting techniques and intentions into their own works on paper as a direct result of that initial commission, will also be on display.

With this exhibition, “we’re looking forwards and backwards simultaneously,” says Skerritt.

For “Munguyhmunguyh,” Guymala, who usually paints on eucalyptus bark surfaces that he collects and treats himself, has painted on paper Ngalkunburriyaymi (female Water Spirits who guard sacred water holes and Dreaming sites) encircled by Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent, the most important ancestor spirit in West Arnhem Land, who appears in a variety of animal forms in Kuwinjku mythology). He used ochre pigments, which he collected from the bush and mixed himself.

“I like to paint for myself, so kids can learn the stories. I want to pass down the stories to my sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Our grandfathers learnt from their fathers and gave this knowledge to us, and I want to share this with the younger generations,” says Guymala, who also wants to inspire young people to paint, so that they, too, can share these stories.

“Kunwardde Bim Kakukyime (Rock Art Style),” 2019 by Gabriel Maralngurra. Courtesy the artist and Injalak Arts

Maralngurra describes his work as “similar to the rock art but different; it comes out of my head.” What’s notable about Maralngurra’s piece in this show is that it combines a variety of painting traditions in a single image: He uses an X-ray style to paint overlapping mimih spirits (a 50,000-year-old subject) and animals (a 7,000-year-old subject), in combination with ceremonial cross-hatching (made public only in the last 50 years), and colonial influence (European missionaries introduced the bright blue pigment that Maralngurra uses, but does not allow to take over the piece).

“I’ve got stories to tell the whole world,” says Maralngurra, who will be in Charlottesville, along with Guymala, to open the exhibition. “About how it’s done, the painting and the stories and our culture, bininj way.”


“Shadow Sites”

New City Arts Welcome Gallery January 24 – 30

“Echoes #3: Tjalini,” 2019, by Robert Fielding. Courtesy the artist and Mimili Maku Arts

On view for just one week at Welcome Gallery, the works of Steaphan Paton and Robert Fielding together demonstrate how modern media such as photography and video have become a vital part of some Indigenous artists’ practice.

Through the works in this exhibition, both Paton (a member of the Gunai and Mondero nations) and Fielding (a Western Aranda and Yankunytjatjara artist from Mimili community on APY Lands, who also has Afghan heritage) inspect their cultural identity and history, along with notions of Country, belonging, race, colonialism, and more.

In his artist statement about the three “Echoes” works that will be on view at Welcome Gallery, Fielding writes:

“The objects in these photographs are echoes of the past. With them come the memories of past afflictions upon our land and culture: the memories of rations, missions, mining, and farming.

“Like manta (earth) continually reclaiming the physical remnants of the past through rust and erosion, Anangu culture continually reclaims its place as part of our landscape. By reshaping echoes of the past into songs of our future, we create new memories, new ways of keeping culture strong.

“Where one sees an oil barrel, I see a fire pit, a place to share stories.

Where one sees a flour bucket, I see the many secrets we carry and hide.

Where one sees a water tank, I see shelter and protection.

Where one sees desecrated land, I see a resilient future.

“The words sandblasted into the rusted surfaces expose our radiant and unblemished truth that stands strong against the test of time and change. We have absorbed the past, and made it our future.”


Land of contrasts

There’s quite a bit of diversity among Australia’s Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) peoples. Today, there are more than 250 distinct language groups across the continent, which is slightly smaller than the continental United States and has a varied geography comprised of deserts, temperate and tropical forests, and snow-capped mountain ranges.


“By the Strength of Their Skin”

Second Street Gallery, January 24 – March 20

If you had to pick three of the top artists in Australia at the moment, Nonggirrnga, Regina, and Mabel would be pretty high on most people’s lists,” says Kluge-Ruhe curator Henry Skerritt about the three artists exhibiting in “By the Strength of Their Skin” at Second Street Gallery.

Nonggirrnga Marawili, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, and Mabel Juli are three of Australia’s most revered artists (their works are collected in major Australian museums), and each has created new works specifically for this show.

“Each of these women artists approach their art practice through the prism of their Country, their Dreamings, and the everyday expression of living in a place where the spiritual and the quotidian are seamlessly connected,” writes Second Street Gallery curator Kristen Chiacchia in the show’s press release.

“Baratjala,” by Nonggirrnga Marawili. Courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre

“The animating tension of Aboriginal art has always been this tension between innovation and tradition,” says Skerritt, who opines that Marawili’s works are some of the finest examples of that very thing. She learned to paint on bark in the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, assisting her late husband, Djapu statesman and artist Djutadjuta Mununggurr. After her husband’s death, Marawili continued painting the Djapu themes approved by her husband, and, as the Second Street press releases notes, over time came to explore “intuitive subjects and mark making outside the realm of the sacred.” Now a multidisciplinary artist living and working at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art center in the Northern Territory, she’s known for her bark paintings, larrakitj (memorial poles, including a few on view in “The Inside World”), and prints. Her works articulate how country comes alive, both physically and spiritually, by the movement of natural elements seen and unseen.

“Syaw (Fish Net),” 2019, by Regina Pilawuk Wilson. Courtesy the artist and Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation

Charlottesville audiences may be familiar with Wilson’s work—she had a solo show at Second Street in summer 2018. A painter and master weaver, Wilson is also known for her role in the Aboriginal land rights movement. As European whites colonized the land, they forced Indigenous peoples to live on reserves and missions, with strict rules that in many cases sought to slowly dissolve or outright eliminate Indigenous traditions, languages, and cultures. (It is not unlike what European whites did to Indigenous American peoples.) In the early 1970s, Wilson and her husband decided to move off the mission and back to their country (traditional land), starting a community for Ngangikurrungurr people in the Daly River region, with not much more than a tent. During her visit to Charlottesville in June 2018, Wilson explained that they had to leave the mission in order to practice their traditions, their art, their language. Many of her paintings are of weavings, preserving stitches in paint so that they can live on, visible and present for future generations.

“Marranyji & Jiyirriny,” by Mabel Juli. Courtesy artist and Warmun Art Centre

Gija artist Juli has been painting since the 1980s, when she settled in Warmun, East Kimberley Western Australia. She was about 50 years old at the time, and two of the community’s celebrated elder artists encouraged her to make artwork. According to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s website, Juli has effectively incorporated pinks, purples, and greens into the Gija color palette, which was previously traditionally comprised of ochres. Her large-scale works often feature a few icons or symbols (say, a crescent moon, a four-pointed star, or a bird) on a solid color surface; they may appear simple, but they tell rich stories. For many years, she painted Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) creation narratives of her country, Darrajayn, but more recently, she’s broadened her practice to include works about language conservation and climate change.


“The Inside World”

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, January 24 – May 24

The largest of these shows, “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles” presents the work of more than 50 artists from the remote Aboriginal communities of Kunbarrllanjnja (or Gunbalanya), Maningrida, Milingimbi Island, and Yirrkala, all located in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. On view in the upstairs gallery at The Fralin Museum of Art, “The Inside World” is more than a large-scale installation. It’s a journey.

“There are some things that unite the peoples of Arnhem Land,” Henry Skerritt writes in the exhibition catalog. “One is their belief that everything in existence has an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside meaning,’” and that together they “[operate] as a continuum that structure the entire universe.”

Some of the memorial poles featured in “The Inside World,” a traveling exhibition now at The Fralin Museum of Art. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith

“Traditionally, memorial poles like those in ‘The Inside World’ would have been used as ossuaries: the final resting place for the bones of the dead,” Skerritt says. “The poles would be made from the trunk of a carefully selected eucalyptus tetradonta (stringybark tree) that had been naturally hollowed out by termites. The most perfectly cylindrical trunk would be selected and its bark stripped so that it could be painted with powerful clan designs that would identify and protect the spirit of the deceased.”

But in recent years, writes Wukun Wanambi, a Yolngu artist, “the elders have given us authority to use [memorial poles] in our art.”

Aesthetic use of memorial poles really began in 1988, with “The Aboriginal Memorial” exhibition at the Biennale of Sydney, says Margo Smith. Artist Djon Mundine organized the installation of 200 painted poles from 43 artists from the community of Ramingining in Arnhem Land, one pole for each year of European settlement, commemorating all of the Indigenous people who died defending their lands and their cultures from colonizers. (The highly political installation is now a permanent exhibition in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.)

Since then, memorial poles—called larrakitj, lorrkkon, or dupun—that have been painted as art and not used as ossuaries, have been regular fixtures in Aboriginal art shows around the globe.

“The reason why the old people have given this authority is so that we—the Yolnu people—can maintain our culture and pass it on to the generations that come after us, to build up their strength and wisdom,” adds Wanambi. “But larrakitj can’t stand by himself: larrakitj’s identity comes from its family, and this attaches it to our culture and Law. Balanda (non-Aboriginal people) need to understand the whole structure—not just the art part—or they will never understand.”

Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith

And so, the 112 poles in “The Inside World” (at other venues, the traveling exhibition has shown 99 poles from the Debra and Dennis Scholl collection; this iteration also includes 13 from the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection) are grouped by artist, and then by location, throughout the gallery space. With the walls painted black, the objects spotlit and anchored in glittering black coal slag, eco-acoustics recorded in the bush floating through the air, viewers (the vast majority of us Balanda) will symbolically traverse time and the Australian landscape in a motion to begin to understand the stories contained within, and projected by, these groups of poles.

“Llarakitj need their family because it gives them strength and power,” says Wanambi. “One larrakitj on its own is like nothing—it doesn’t mean anything—but if you put three or four together in one group it is like a family: they have the strength of the family ties from that area.”


“Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars”

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, February 11 – May 31

Brian Robinson often says that he was born with a pencil in his hand. “No surface was sacred for me…I drew on pretty much everything from the kitchen table to household walls, to windows to the back fence…pretty much everywhere, and so that creativity continued to grow and flourish.”

Robinson is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia.

“By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” 2017, by Brian Robinson. Courtesy the artist and Mossenson Galleries

“The artworks presented in ‘Tithuyil’ look at life in the Torres Strait with a bit of a twist,” Robinson says. He writes in his artist statement that these etchings and linocut prints “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination. Wise-eyed sea creatures, muscular warriors, stars in the heavens, broad-petaled flowering plants, and hollow-eyed skulls sweep through his works. Interwoven amongst this realm of references to his island home and the surrounding sea waters and islands of the Torres Strait, are the tokens and talismans of a parallel life within a global culture of superheroes, comic characters, and ancient Classical mythologies.”

In juxtaposing these seemingly disparate visual icons with a delicately struck balance of humor and seriousness, Robinson captures the viewer’s curiosity, requiring a close look to parse out the relationships among these icons.

About a dozen of Robinson’s works will be on view in this show. One of them, “By virtue of this act I hereby take possession of this land,” is rendered in white line on a black surface that stylistically recalls ancient Greek vase painting. At its center is James Cook, the British Royal Navy captain whose ship brought the first Europeans to the coast of the continent now known as Australia in 1770. Cook’s arrival precipitated extraordinary violence, and eventual colonization, committed by European Whites against the land’s native peoples.

Scrolling Torres Strait aquatic flora designs surround Cook as he charts a course on the map, navigating by the stars in the sky above him—pixelated alien creatures from the 1978 arcade game “Space Invaders”—as he plans to invade the space of Indigenous Australian peoples.


“Ngayulu Nguraku Ninti (The Country I Know)”

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through February 2

Country is the subject of this series of paintings by Barbara Moore and Sharon Adamson, two artists who live in the Amata community in the APY Lands  in northwestern South Australia, a geographically vast but sparsely populated area made up of numerous unique Aboriginal communities. Both women paint very personal expressions of the natural world that has nourished them and sustained their peoples for tens of thousands of years.

Barbara Moore paints a mural in the Kluge-Ruhe breezeway in November 2019. Photo by Tom Cogill

Moore, an Anmatyerre artist who started painting later in her life, in 2003, maintains a devoted art practice while also working full-time as a senior health worker at an Amata clinic. She paints large-scale, colorful works that convey the great variety and vivacity of the landscape and her relationship to it. The circles in her works represent water holes in the desert rock formations—vital sources of drinking water for the people who live among and travel desert lands.

Two of her paintings in the show are rendered in grayscale. During an artist talk at the Kluge-Ruhe in November 2019, Moore, who was in town for a residency along with Adamson, explained why she departed from her usual palette for these particular works: They’re of the nighttime.

Sharon Adamson. Photo by Tom Cogill

Like Moore, Adamson paints at Tjala Arts center in Amata, where she’s also employed. And though the two artists’ works share a certain fluid dynamism, they are distinct.

Adamson, a young, emerging artist, grew up watching her great-grandfather paint Rainbow Serpent stories, and she’s chosen to carry on not just his methods of mixing pigments, but his preferred subject. In many Aboriginal cultures, the Rainbow Serpent is a creating deity regarded as protector of the land, its people, and sources of life (such as rivers and water holes); if enraged, the Rainbow Serpent can also be a destructive force. Adamson usually paints these momentous stories on rather large canvases, but here she shows three smaller—but still considerable—works that better fit the Kluge-Ruhe’s limited wall space.


“With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak”

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Through April 5

Fiber works made by women have “historically been regarded as craft and devalued in the art world,” says the Kluge-Ruhe’s Smith, who’s also an anthropologist, and “With Her Hands” pushes back against that idea, with pieces that demonstrate the artistry that goes into such work. Twenty-five women from the community of Gapuwiyak, in Australia’s Northern Territory, created these 100 diverse pieces, which include necklaces made from shells, seeds, and nuts; mats; a variety of baskets made from natural and dyed pandanus palm; ceremonial headbands and armbands; and a selection of sculpture. All of the works are part of the Kluge-Ruhe’s collection, and the show was curated by six women of color working through the Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative.

Kangaroo by Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu. Courtesy the artist and Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts

Together, the pieces in “With Her Hands” speak to the rich history of fiber work in Aboriginal cultures but also “to women’s lives today in Aboriginal communities,” says Smith. The works demonstrate each individual artist’s reverence for tradition and inclination toward innovation. For example, artist Anna Ramata Malibirr discovered that she could boil emerald green crepe paper (not something her pre-colonial ancestors would have had access to) to dye her fibers.

 


But…how?

How did Charlottesville end up with the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to Indigenous Australian art? A billionaire was moved by an art show.

John W. Kluge—at the time one of the richest men in America, and also an Albemarle County resident—saw the landmark “Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia” exhibition at the Asia Society Galleries in New York City in 1988. Inspired by the show, Kluge made his first of several trips to Australia in 1989, and he began collecting and commissioning works from Aboriginal artists.

In 1993, Kluge purchased the collection of the late Ed Ruhe, a University of Kansas English professor who began collecting Aboriginal art during a professorship in Australia in 1965. Ruhe purchased work directly from artists, community art centers, and Aboriginal art dealers (a few of these pieces are currently on view in a small exhibition in the Brown Science and Engineering Library at UVA), and amassed a library of related books and articles.

In 1997, Kluge donated the bulk of these collections to UVA, and the museum opened in its current location—in an old mansion on Pantops—in 1999, where it serves as a global hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

Categories
Arts

January galleries guide

Precarious balance

Polly Breckenridge’s monotypes at Chroma Projects

Part of the appeal of printmaking is that it gives an artist the ability to create multiple copies of the same image.

But for local artist Polly Breckenridge, the attraction lies in the printmaking process itself—the way the pressure of the press embosses each design element into the paper, for instance—and how it satisfies her craving for “creating objects of beauty with color and layers and texture.” And so she uses that process to make monotypes (unique, one-off prints), some of which are on view in “You Belong Here Now,” at Chroma Projects gallery through January.

Image courtesy the artist

Inspired in part by No One Belongs Here More Than You, a collection of short stories published by filmmaker, writer, and performance artist Miranda July in 2005, Breckenridge’s series of monotypes use shape, line, color, texture, and a set series of human gestures to create compositions that she says “[analyze] how much we have in common, and how we’re different,” that address “our precarious balance as we go through our lives, as to where we belong, and that feeling of belonging.”

Some of the prints are vibrant and bold, with layers of ink covering most of the space; others are more ephemeral. Similar figures repeat throughout the series, representative of gestures that Breckenrdige created and chose “as an expression of a certain universal feeling.”

In one piece, a figure plunges headfirst into a hoop, only its legs still visible, in what Breckenridge calls “a visual representation of diving down a rabbit hole,” of how sometimes it’s easy to dive into another person (or even oneself), but other times, with a different person, that same action is quite difficult.

Image courtesy the artist

Another piece shows a figure caught by the big hand in “a falling kind of gesture,” says Breckenridge. “Being caught by something bigger than yourself, which could be the collective consciousness, or another person that’s there to catch you.”

Because each viewer brings their own experience and interpretation to the pieces, Breckenridge constantly learns new things about the meaning contained within her works. Perhaps that’s because, like the monotypes themselves, we humans are all alike, and yet each of us is completely unique.


First Fridays: January 3

Openings

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “You Belong Here Now,” featuring monotype prints by Polly Breckenridge. 5-7pm.

Fellini’s 200 W. Market St. “The Creator’s Creation,” a show of photography by Laura Parker. 5:30-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “”, featuring acrylic and mixed media works by Jim Henry; in all other hall galleries, the new members show, featuring photography, metalwork, oil paintings, and more by new McGuffey associate members. 5:30-7:30pm.

Michael Williams at McGuffey Art Center

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “New Zealand Watercolors,” an exhibition of work by Blake Hurt. 5-7pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. An exhibition of photography by Charlie Dean. 5-7pm.


Other January shows

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Ridged,” an exhibition of work by local LGBTQ+ artists. Opens January 10.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Coloring Outside the Lines,” featuring fluid acrylic works by Paula Boyland.

C’Ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. Studio sale, featuring works from member artists.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists, and  “Time to Get Ready: fotografia social,” both through January 5; “Select Works from the Alan Groh-Buzz Miller Collection”; and “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles,” and “Figures of Memory,” both opening January 24.

Java Java 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “How do you C’ville?,” an exhibit by Allison Shoemaker highlighting local businesses and investors.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “A Place Fit for Women,” featuring paintings by Robert Shetterly. Opening January 18, 6-8pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon,” featuring atmospheric landscape paintings as well as stylized works of abstracted shapes and heavily worked surfaces, through January 19, with a reception January 12, 2-4pm; and “Time: Ann Lyne, John McCarthy, Ana Rendich” opening January 25, 4-6pm.

Ana Rendich at Yes Leux Du Monde

Mudhouse Coffee 213 W. Main St. “CONFLICT/Resolution,” Adam Disbrow’s series reflecting the merger of the “seen” with the “unseen.”

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Bold,” featuring acrylic paintings by Novi Beerens and collages by Karen Whitehill.

Over the Moon Bookstore 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Natural Light,” a show of oil and acrylic paintings by John Carr Russell.

Radio IQ/WVTF 216 W. Water St. “40 Faces, 40 Years,” a photography exhibit marking the forty years of service of the Virginia Poverty Law Center. Opening January 15, 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Illuminations & Illusions,” a show of paintings and sculpture spanning more than four decades of Beatrix Ost’s career as a visual artist, through January 10; and “By the Strength of Their Skin,” paintings by Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Mabel Juli, and Nonggirrnga Marawili, three of Australia’s most acclaimed women artists, opening January 24. In the Dové Gallery, “The Slow Death of Rocks,” reverse painting on glass and sculpture by Doug Young, through January 10.

Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes at Woodberry Forest School

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Way. “Dreamy Landscapes,” featuring work in oil by Julia Kindred.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Modern Folk Art,” a juried exhibition; “Iconoclasts,” featuring works on fabric by Annie Layne; and “Small Works,” featuring pieces by SVAC members.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Marker’s Edge,” featuring works in marker on paper by Philip Jay Marlin.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Retrospective,” a show chronicling more than a decade of the “Every Day is a Holiday” calendars made annually by collaborative artists and lifelong friends Eliza Evans and Virginia Rieley. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Shadow Sites,” an exhibition of installation and photographic work by Steaphan Paton and Robert Fielding, two acclaimed contemporary Australian Indigenous artists. Opening January 24.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “in context.,” featuring paintings in acrylic on canvas and paper by Madeleine Rhondeau-Rhodes. Reception January 9, 6:30-7:30pm.


First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

Turn it up: Our favorite local recordings this year

Lots of people complain that there’s no music scene here. And we get it—there can be lulls in shows (and definitely lulls in good shows)—but a music scene is more than what’s on stage. We love recordings, too, so may this list serve as your entry point to some local sonic treasures. We’ve compiled a lengthy list of local album and EP releases (scroll down for that) and while we were at it, highlighted a few of our favorites.


Fried Egg, Square One

When every day starts to feel exactly the same, when you’ve bought a car to drive to work in order to pay for the car you bought, you get down on your knees and pray to whatever idol you pray to for a band like Fried Egg to make you jump out of the pan. On Square One, an album about feeling disillusioned with modern life, the half-Charlottesville half-Richmond band turns up the heat with tight, off-center hardcore punk that’s neither over- nor undercooked.

Read more: “Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots”

Heron & Crane, Firesides

“It’s very much ready to be played during a Folgers coffee commercial,” Dave Gibson told C-VILLE about Heron & Crane’s Firesides. Gibson and longtime friend and musical collaborator Travis Kokas used a limited palette of instruments—a 12-string guitar, a few MOOG and Yamaha synthesizers, an Oberheim DX drum machine, and an organelle—to venture out onto the lush and gentle kinda-folksy, lightly-psychedelic, almost-kosmische, pastoral aural landscape.

Read more: “North by southeast: Heron & Crane’s Firesides arrives via online collaboration”

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music

Don’t turn your nose up at this kids’ album —we’re not talking Wee Sing Silly Songs, KidzBop, or even “Rockabye Baby” here. Smells Like Music was made by a bunch of adult musicians with pretty good manners and a sense of humor, people who usually make electronic, experimental, and rock music for grown-ups. The record is silly (“Mice in My Underwear Drawer”), endearing (“I Love You”), inspirational (“Start A Band”), and slightly ridiculous in the best way (“Who’s cooking pancakes?”). You don’t have to be a kid to get a total kick out of it.


Nathaniel Star, Bush Master

There’s alchemy in the combination of Nathaniel Star’s butter-smooth voice and producer Vintage’s rich beats, and the resulting elixir was so magical, it caught the ear of Bandcamp’s Chaka V. Grier, who named it one of the site’s “Best Soul on Bandcamp: August 2019” selections. Grier sums up the album’s appeal perfectly: “It’s not an easy thing to achieve—making music that enchants and enlightens—but Star makes it sound effortless.”

Read more: “Time to play: After nearly a decade, Nathaniel Star returns to the stage”

Patient 0, Girl Problems

In order for a small music scene to survive, young people have to start bands, make music, and play shows. So it was exciting to see a fledgling rock band like Patient 0 (one with solid skill and a lot of potential) release a full-length record, Girl Problems, which the teen band members recorded at the Music Resource Center here in town. Singer, lyricist, and bassist Tessa Majors wrote with a lot of heart and a good dose of ’90s riot grrrl attitude, and moved her audiences at every show. Majors died while this list was being put together, but her voice lives on in this record.


Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer

Local drum ‘n’ sax duo puts on one of the most fascinating live shows, and its recordings are no different. Do you lock into Steve Snider’s drum grooves, following them as they take roundabouts and sharp angles? Or into Travis Thatcher’s sorta-distorted sax paths? What if you get both at once? Whoa.


Waasi, From Virginia with Love

This is Malcolm “Waasi” Wills’ second release in as many years, and the young rapper has this to say about his new record: “If you don’t know me, I feel like From Virginia With Love gives you a perfect description of my personality: Funky, feel good, and raw.” He’s got flow, social consciousness, self-awareness, and solid stage presence—a combination that makes it easy to see how his record release show nearly sold out The Southern Café & Music Hall.


Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma

Riffs, riffs, riffs, and more riffs. This local punk ‘n’ roll band has put out a couple tapes in recent years, and its first 7″ record (issued on local label Infinite Repeats) careens in at just under 10 minutes, with singer Josh Phipps maxing out his voice at whatever cost, eager to get his point across. The record’s great, and the band’s live show is even better. Next time Wild Rose plays in town, don’t miss it.


More 2019 local releases

Albums

Abstract Threats, Contentment (indie rock)

Alice Clair, Loop (folksy rock and soul)

Andrew Neil, Merry Go Round (alternative indie folk, grunge)

Angel Metro, Dark Days Bright Lights (dark synthpop)

Angela on the Arts, Within (chamber jazz, modern classical)

Bergot, Surmae (electronic, experimental)

Big Lean, C.A.L.M. and The Rabbit Hole (smooth, soulful hip-hop)

Butterfly Vendetta, Running in Place and Contents Under Pressure (pop punk, rock)

Charles Owens Trio, Three and Thirteen (jazz)

Chris Hall, red winter beats (emo, experimental, pop, trap)

David Wax Museum, Line of Light (indie folk-rock, Mexo-Americana)

Dropping Julia, Wake Up (funky/rootsy pop-rock)

Fried Egg, Square One (hardcore punk)

Front Porch Revival, Live at Lance’s (drum & bass, experimental hip-hop)

Grand Banks, Autumn Cannon and Live 3-31-2019 (experimental, electroacoustic, drone, raga, pastoral)

Greg C. Brown, Premieres (classical guitar)

Guion Pratt, Drone for the Holidays Vol.I III (experimental, ambient, drone)

Harli & The House of Jupiter, Deja Vu (alternative rock)

H.B. Kipps, Dead Air Telepathy (electronic, video game music)

Heron & Crane, Firesides (pastoral electronic psych-folk, library music)

Holly Renee Allen, Appalachian Piece-Meal (country, folk, Americana)

Human Shaped Objects, Country Countdown 2013 (ambient, algorithmic)

J Certi, Now or Never (hip-hop, rap)

Jeneene, the Areas (punk, garage)

Jordan Perry, Names and a Draft of First Cold (experimental guitar)

Jovon White, Thought Noise (experimental hip-hop)

LaQuinn, Nostalgia and Laquinn in South 900 (rap, hip-hop)

Lowland Hum, Glyphonic (minimalist hush folk)

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music (electronic rock for kids)

Matéo Amero and Ezra Miller, Tales from the Lazy River (country, folk, cowpunk)

Minnush, Minnush (Sephardic, jazz, roots, improvisation)

Nate Braeuer, altars were here (acoustic indie folk)

Nathaniel Star, Bush Master (Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul)

New Immersion Blender, Feel Right, MF (experimental, kosmiche)

Oil Derek, The Devil’s Nine Questions (country, folk, spiritual)

Panda Slugger, Standing Outside in the Rain Trying to Remember the Way It Feels to Believe (ambient, chill)

Patient 0, Girl Problems (alt. rock with a touch of riot grrl)

Pearl Pile, Plastic Plant (alternative basement psych, indie rock)

Piko, œ (avant garde, experimental indie)

Pluto, Pluto (reggae-ish electronic)

Salvaticus, Ordo Naturalis (black metal)

Ships in the Night, The Remixes (darkwave, dream pop)

Six Foot Ceilings, Six Foot Ceilings (pop rock)

Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer (experimental drum ‘n’ sax)

ST/MiC, sevens & thr33s or something like that (lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals)

Studebaker Huck, Wired in the Darkness and Barn Burner (punk-ish Southern rock)

Tracy Howe, Things That Grow (gospel, folk, rock)

Va Doe, The Chris Newman Show (rap, hip-hop)

The Voice of Saturnotherwordly transport (electronic, synth, kosmiche)

Willie DE, Runaway Child (blues-rock singer-songwriter, jazz)

 


EPs

ArtificalRealitySoundscape, Neutral Centipede Carpool (experimental electronic, noise)

Beasts of Least Concern, That’s Not How I Like to Do Business (gothy acoustic ballads)

Bobblehead, Bobblehead (alternative swamp rock boogie)

Cameron Taylor, The Reef (experimental hip-hop)

Carry, Small, Early, Free (Appalachian experimental drone)

Gold Connections, Like A Shadow (hi-fi indie rock)

Gold Sounds, Gold Sounds (jazz-funk)

Good Dog NigelThe Implied Sunrise (indie rock, power pop)

jaRed lodwick, ¿ (hip-hop, rap)

Kate Bollinger, I Don’t Wanna Lose (chill indie bedroom pop)

Kendall Street Company, Lunar Dude (improvised rock, jazz-grass)

Kylie Cloud, Royal City Harbor Remixes 2

LaQuinn, If I Sold Dope (the Mixtape) (rap, hip-hop)

Lost Ray, Conflux (ambient electronic)

Matéo Amero, Untitled (folksy country rock)

Maxwell Mandell and Elinor Glassco, Next To You (electronic singer-songwriter)

Naomi Alligator, Big World (arty alternative singer-songwriter)

Paint the Watermelon, Composer (alternative ambient electronic)

Patrick Keese, Gallery (indie chamber pop)

Pretty Pulp, Break Me Up and Atrophy (grunge, alternative rock)

PROLO, singles ep and Te Hip Vol. 1 (hip-hop, rap, boom-bap)

Reagan Riley, Glass (chill neo-soul)

Ruckus the Bulldog, Welcome to Thrashville (hard rock, comedy)

The Skavaliers, The Skavaliers (ska)

Spillway, Fall 2019 Live Demo (shoegaze-y hard indie rock)

Stray Fossa, Laridae EP (poppy indie rock)

Synthetic Division, digital singles (synthpop)

Time Nothing, Losing Faith (metal, metalcore)

The Vailix, Ageless (conceptual hard rock)

True Spirit, II (noise-y post-punk)

Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma (punk ‘n’ roll)

Wülf Boi, Thanatophilia (rap, hip-hop)


Local mixtapes

Various (Music Resource Center), It’s Here. It’s Always Been Here. (alternative, hip-hop, indie, rap, rock)

Various, Nine Pillars Mixtape Vol. 2 (rap, hip-hop)

 


What’d we miss? Email us at arts@c-ville.com to add your album or EP to the online list.

Categories
Arts

Stitches in time: Jo Lee Tarbell pushes the needle on quilting traditions

Jo Lee Tarbell likes fabric and color, and the evidence is all around this 85-year-old quilter’s Charlottesville home.

A traditional quilt she hand-stitched stretches across her bed, at its center a multi-color, many-pointed star bursting forth from an ivory background. Draped over the back of an upholstered armchair is a piece Tarbell calls “Earth, Wind, and Fire,” an abstract quilt made with rich, jewel-tone fabrics and mesh pockets full of stones she collected from her driveway.

Above the nearby mantel hangs a framed “confetti quilt” of a Tuscan villa scene made of countless tiny scraps of fabric and thousands of stitches. It looks like an Impressionist painting both in composition and its concern for light, each piece of fabric like an individual brush stroke. These are just a few of the pieces she has on display, folded on shelves, and on various tables and countertops.

Tarbell’s fascination with sewing began when she was a child, watching her great-grandmother work on a treadle machine. By the time Tarbell reached junior high school, she made all of her own clothes; in college, she sewed between her liberal arts coursework.

After college, she started teaching quilting, wrote quilting books, and ran her own quilt shop, The Handmaiden, in Dayton, Ohio. She started traveling, teaching and exhibiting her own work in just about every major city in the U.S. (and once in Salzburg, Austria). Her husband often gave her a hand, as did their two sons, Rich (a Charlottesville-based photographer) and Rob (a fine arts professor at Virginia Commonwealth University).

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, quilting was regarded by most as an old-fashioned, niche craft, a folk art. But as Robert Shaw notes in his book The Art Quilt, in the two decades leading up to the United States bicentennial in 1976, “feminist historians began to reexamine the role of women in American society and art and pointed with great pride to the forgotten work of their foremothers. For the first time, quilts were read as social documents, embodying the history and values of their otherwise silent makers.” And so mid-20th-century quilters revived and recreated some of those more traditional patterns, like the log cabin, bear’s claw, nine-patch, pinwheel, and eight-pointed star.

Before long, quilters started to put their own spin on the patterns and the process, creating expressive pieces that could be sculptural and painterly and blurred the line between fine art and craft. Thus began the art quilt movement, which Tarbell has helped evolve over the last half century, including here in Charlottesville, her home for the last 20 years. She’s a founding member of the local Fiber and Stitch Collective, offering both classes and critiques to local quilters. And she’s taught her two granddaughters to sew, too.

Tarbell describes her own quilting as abstract. She’s inspired by fabric first—its fiber, color, pattern, texture. She can use the fabric as it is, or alter it by adding or stripping dye. The fabric asks her, “What else? What else? What else?” as she considers how to make a circle more interesting: overlap them, make them different sizes, cut them up into other shapes. She’ll add embellishment and embroidery, use different stitching techniques, all the while considering color, texture, and composition.

“It’s endless, really,” what you can do “when it’s not a pattern anymore,” Tarbell says with a wink.

Tarbell’s passion was nearly interrupted a year and a half ago, when she went into the hospital for a knee replacement and came out five weeks later, unable to walk on her own. She moved into an assisted living facility and sewing became more of an effort that it had ever been before. She decided to part with most of her quilting accoutrements—keeping just a few boxes of material, which her sons brought to her, along with her sewing machine.

But, as it always has, the fabric called to her—the greens, the purples, the patterns—and she started a new quilt. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” she told herself as she cut, sewed, embroidered some botanical shapes, and added some buttons, going with the flow the fabric revealed to her. “The more I could prove to myself that I was making something artistic, the happier I was,” she says of the quilt that’s on view this month in the Fiber and Stitch Collective’s “Best of 2019” show at CitySpace. “It was very much a healing thing.”

Healing enough that she regained some mobility and moved back home to live among the work that causes her to innovate and push the limits of what she expects of herself as an artist. “I’ve surprised me sometimes,” she exclaims, eyes wide as she looks around at her pieces. “You have to keep doing what you love. You really do.”


Jo Lee Tarbell’s art quilt, as well as an instructional demonstration on “inspiration,” is on view at CitySpace this month, as part of the Fiber and Stitch Collective’s “Best of 2019” show.

Categories
Arts

Literary guidance: Musician Chris Campanelli communes with poetic greats in new song cycle

While rehearsing songs for this Saturday’s show at New Dominion Bookshop, Chris Campanelli’s been thinking about his audience.

But he says he hasn’t envisioned playing for the people who might fill the seats, or the passersby who may wander in from the December evening chill. He’s been thinking instead about performing for the books, for the tens of thousands of tales both true and invented held between their covers, all part of a persistent, perpetual conversation that transcends both time and space.

It’s a fitting setting for Campanelli’s return to the Charlottesville music scene, and for the debut of songs that mark a new chapter in his own songwriting story.

For a number of years in the early 2010s, Campanelli’s life centered around music. He played in local folk acts The Hill & Wood and Nettles, and, along with members of those bands, had his own project, Camp Christopher. It was “a kind of rotating circus,” he says with a quiet laugh.

In 2012, Camp Christopher released a record, Beyond the Word, and not long after that, Campanelli’s focus shifted away from music and toward other things. He got married and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. The couple had a child, moved back to Charlottesville (where Campanelli teaches high school English), and soon after had a second child.

Though he hasn’t released music since 2012, he’s been writing all the while. Music has “been something that has continued to gestate in some ways, on a deeper level, while tending to other things,” he says. “Different songs come out of that, when music is not squarely center in your life.”

The songs that have come out of that seven-year stretch have a certain “internal coherence to them” for Campanelli, who refers to this set of songs as a song cycle. A number of themes course through the compositions, including humankind’s dialogue with the four seasons, and the question, “How do you move toward someone?” But if there’s a thread that ties it all into a bow, it’s one of affirmation.

“My tendency [is] to see a massive shadow from a little cloud,” says Campanelli, who, upon receiving an increase in his fourth grade homework had a bit of an existential crisis. He remembers telling his mother that “life is difficult, because homework continually takes away your time, and then you go to college, and then you work, and then you die.”

For Campanelli, “affirmations have been a learned way of countering that tendency.” It’s something he got from 20th-century Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

In his December 1995 Nobel lecture “Crediting Poetry,” Heaney said, “I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as for the murderous.”

“Crediting the marvelous” is what Campanelli seeks to do in song form. He meditates on a tree (how long it’s been there, who planted it, who else has looked at it) in one song; in another he ruminates on the Vancouver clouds, how the sun hits them just so. Campanelli describes it as “wanting to freeze that moment and harvest it in a song,” so that it can act as an anchor, one of those “stable, irreducible things in the world to return to” when everything you see on the news feels dark, or unstable.

“High above the ancient plain / Where man first found his tongue confused / The tumbled clouds and sun composed / A city made of finest substance / That memory can never follow,” Campanelli sings about the clouds as he invokes the 13th-century Italian poet Dante. In Paradiso, Dante talks about how, at times, he’s been so absorbed and present in his experiences that his memory cannot follow. “I’ve always been fascinated by that notion, that we can experience something, know something, and yet not retain it,” says Campanelli, whether it’s the childlike desire to live amongst some spectacular clouds, or something else.

Another song, “Seven Years,” explores Campanelli’s experience of “reaching for something to say and not having it.” It’s “a song from the distance of exile, the distance of alienation, searching for an affirmation, knowing one’s there but not having a name for it yet.” As he points out, seven years is the amount of time Aeneas is away in Virgil’s Aeneid, and the amount of time that Odysseus spends on the cliffs in Homer’s The Odyssey.

Throughout the song cycle, which Campanelli hasn’t yet titled, he searches for affirmations, reaches them, and then falls away from them before locating them once again. In this motion, and in his evocation of classic literary themes, Campanelli says he’s “trying to draw out the grandeur of what can feel really mundane and petty.” And he’s found that some songs have stuck for a reason: “They were teaching me when I first wrote them. They say things that are better than what I say.”

“I’ve increasingly seen that as something I want to do in my songs, affirm something that other people can also have access to,” says Campanelli. “To state the obvious in such a way that you realize it wasn’t obvious.” He wants his listeners to credit the marvelous, too. It’s a gift he hopes to present to the people who fill the seats at New Dominion on Saturday.

So perhaps it’s not just the books he’s been rehearsing for, after all.


Chris Campanelli has played in The Hill & Wood and Nettles, and led his own band, Camp Christopher. He debuts his untitled song cycle at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday at 7pm.

Categories
Arts

December galleries guide

Creature conflicts

People often describe Aggie Zed’s sculptures as “whimsical,” or “cute.”

“I can see whimsical, but I don’t ever see cute,” says the artist, who uses handmade ceramic and mechanical bits in combination with found materials such as scrap metal, wire, and plastic milk jugs to create what she calls “really dear beings that struggle” with themselves, with one another, and with technology.

Though Zed’s creatures possess both human and animal qualities—a human face beneath a pair of perky rabbit ears, or a dog dancing on human feet—Zed’s work, on view at Chroma Projects gallery through the month of December, is about the human condition. “My work is about people, the kinds of situations humans get themselves into and have to get themselves out of,” she says.

Aggie Zed’s “Catch Me.” Image courtesy the artist

This is evident in the 10-inch-tall sculpture “Catch Me.” As two dogs dance hand in hand among wires and some scaffolding, one stands on tiptoe and leans forward, trusting the bottom dog to catch her. But it’ll be difficult: The bottom dog has already rocked back over its heels, legs splayed out, falling backwards, seemingly prepared to hit the floor. There’s no telling the outcome for these familiar, weird little creatures; perhaps they’ll keep dancing, perhaps they’ll collapse. (Not exactly a “cute” scenario.)

And while the other pieces are smaller, they’re no less complicated in construction and story. “I see most of my characters as being the common man, or the common person—not a creature or being of power,” says Zed, who points out that her work “can get dark” sometimes. “What people do, what people are, there’s certainly dark material there.” But there’s still something hopeful about them. As Zed says, “they look like you want them to succeed.”


Openings

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Give + Take,” a swap shop meets free store meets surplus redistribution meets curb alert. 6pm.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Dancing in Their Heads,” featuring Aggie Zed’s fantastical animated sculpture, and Kelly Lonergan’s drawings of the subconscious life of his protagonists. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Best of 2019” a show of work by the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective. 5-7:30pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “A Clothesline of Characters,” featuring imaginative, hand-knit puppets, mittens, and hats by Mary Whittlesey. 6-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In all galleries, the McGuffey members holiday shop, featuring ornaments, cards, prints, original art, jewelry, glassware, home decor, and more. 5:30-7:30pm.

Adam Disbrow at Mudhouse

Mudhouse Coffee 213 W. Main St. “CONFLICT/Resolution,” Adam Disbrow’s series reflecting the merger of the “seen” with the “unseen.” 5-7pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “New Zealand Watercolors,” an exhibition of work by Blake Hurt. 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Illuminations & Illusions,” a show of paintings and sculpture spanning more than four decades of Beatrix Ost’s career as a visual artist; and in the Dové Gallery, “The Slow Death of Rocks,” reverse painting on glass and sculpture by Doug Young. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Marker’s Edge,” featuring works in marker on paper by Philip Jay Marlin. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Retrospective,” a show chronicling more than a decade of the “Every Day is a Holiday” calendars made annually by collaborative artists and lifelong friends Eliza Evans and Virginia Rieley. 5:30-7:30pm.

Terry Coffey’s Studio 230 Court Square, Ste. 101 B. “Good Cheer,” watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings, as well as handmade jewelry and handpainted birdhouses. 5-7pm.

VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “VMDO Artisans,” a mixed-media show of work by Diana Fang, Bethany Pritchard, Maggie Thacker, John Trevor, and others. 5:30-7:30pm.

Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. The 2019 New City artist exchange exhibit, featuring pottery, works on paper, photography, and paintings by Angela Gleeson, Amdane Sanda, Julia Loman, Kori Price, Somé Louis, Steve Haske, and others. 5-7:30pm.

WVTF Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. An exhibition of work by more than a dozen photographers from the Charlottesville Camera Club. 5-7pm.

Yellow Cardinal Studio 301 E. Market St. A show of small works for holiday giving. 4-7pm.

 

Other December shows

Tatiana Yavorksa-Antrobius at Woodberry Forest School

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Barn Swallow Artisan Gallery 796 Gillums Ridge Rd. A show of work by jeweler and fiber artist Nancy Bond. December 14, 3-5pm.

Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A collection of artwork created by 40 artists and artisans, including Janly Jaggard, V-Anne Evans, and the Geiger family.

The Center 491 Hillsdale Dr. “At Home and Abroad,” photographs by Frank Feigert.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists; “Time to Get Ready: fotografia social”; and “Select Works from the Alan Groh-Buzz Miller Collection.”

Free Union Country School 4220 Free Union Rd., Free Union. Artisans’ open house, featuring pottery by Nancy Ross, backgammon boards by Dave Heller, and more. December 7 and 8, 10am-4pm.

The Gallery at Ebb & Flow 71 River Rd., Faber. “Golden Hours,” an exhibit of recent photographs by Jack Taggart.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon,” featuring atmospheric landscape paintings as well as stylized works of abstracted shapes and heavily worked surfaces.

Over the Moon Bookstore 2025 Library Ave., Crozet. “Natural Light,” a show of oil and acrylic paintings by John Carr Russell. Opens December 7.

Piedmont Virginia Community College 501 College Dr. PVCC Pottery Club’s annual sale. December 7, 9am-noon.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. A juried exhibition of modern folk art; “Iconoclasts,” featuring recent works on fabric by Annie Layne; and a  show of small works by SVAC member artists. Opens December 14, 5-7pm.

Jerry O’Dell at Studio 453

Studio 453 1408 Crozet Ave. Artisan open studio with stained glass artist Jerry O’Dell. December 14, 1-4pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Season of Light,” a community show. Opens December 1, noon.

Uplift Thrift Store 600 Concord Ave. An exhibit of works by painter Karen Mozee. Opens December 20, 4-6pm.

Vitae Spirits 715 Henry Ave. “A Pilgrim’s Journey to Spain, Scotland, and France,” featuring new oil paintings by Randy Baskerville.

Westminster Canterbury 250 Pantops Mountain Rd. “The Pleasure of Your Company,” an exhibit of paintings by Judith Ely. Opens December 2, 2:30-3:30pm.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “Living in the Moment,” featuring drawings and paintings by Tatiana Yavorska-Antrobius. Reception November 14, 6:30-7:30pm.


First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

Making spaces: “Black Enough” web series explores the details of authenticity

Micah Ariel Watson wanted to take a break from writing.

It was summer 2018, and the filmmaker and playwright was back home in Wichita, Kansas. She’d just graduated from UVA with degrees in drama and African American studies, and she’d been busy.

Her films Edges (2016) and Educated Feet (2017) screened at the Virginia Film Festival, and 40th & State (2018) screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She won a prestigious Kennedy Center National Undergraduate Playwriting Award in 2018 for her full-length play Canaan. And The Black Monologues, an original storytelling production that Watson and a group of collaborators first staged at UVA in 2015, resonated so strongly with fellow students that it’s been revived every year since.

So it’s easy to see why Watson wanted to pause for a moment before diving into a dramatic writing graduate program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

But as she reflected on her experience as a black student at UVA (a predominantly white institution), the challenges she faced, and the transformation she began, she processed her thoughts and feelings as she always has: she wrote.

The result is “Black Enough,” a 13-part web series that follows Amaya, a young black woman who grew up in the predominantly white Chicago suburbs, and her friends through their freshman year at Weston, a fictional PWI not unlike Watson’s own alma mater.

Amaya, a dancer and a Christian, “realizes that in order to survive at this PWI, she has to find black friends for her mental health, for her well-being,” says Watson. “But the problem is, she doesn’t feel like she understands black culture enough, or fits into the community enough.”

Each episode of “Black Enough” follows Amaya as she attempts to find her place. She attends a Black Student Union welcome event. She decides to stop relaxing her hair and has it braided, with the goal of eventually wearing it natural. She plays spades and reads Ta-Nehisi Coates for her African and Diaspora Studies 101 class. She dances, she listens to music, she goes to church.

Amaya’s written the ingredients for what she calls her “Black Girl Magic Potion” on her dorm room mirror, ticking them off “in an effort to become ‘blacker,’ which doesn’t quite work for her in the ways that she expected,” says Watson, “because blackness is nuanced and complicated, and not really something that you can write down in a list.”

“Black Enough” was shot mostly on 16mm film, over the course of 19 days this past June, in and around Charlottesville and UVA. Watson wrote, directed, and executive produced the series, and she says that collaborations among the cast and crew are what really made the series sing. From the acting to the costume, sound, and production design, and details such as the Oreo cookies on the table in the scene where Amaya and her friends play spades and debate the question, “What does it mean to be black?”

“We wanted to make something artful and meaningful. It’s not just about giving people something good to watch,” says producer Josh Palmer.

“Black Enough” was not beholden to any “professors, or rules and regulations, or industry standards,” says Watson. “The art was coming from a place of authenticity.”

Watson hopes viewers watch closely enough to pick up on some of the details. For example, when Amaya dances under a streetlight in episode six, the shots reference rapper Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City and To Pimp A Butterfly albums, as well as the music videos Lamar shot with filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. Watson titled the episode “Butterfly Wings.” Transformation, once again.

The first Black Student Union scene was shot at UVA’s Jefferson Hall—young, black people occupying a space while “literally surrounded by images of old, white people; old, white men,” in order “to show [how] even when black people try to create a space for themselves, there’s still a history that they have to try to pierce through in order to make the space actually their own,” says Watson.

The “Black Enough” cast and crew experienced that very challenge acutely while filming episode 10’s BSU protest scene at the UVA amphitheater. The cops showed up and asked what was going on, though Palmer and Watson both say it was clearly a film shoot, with lights, cameras, catering tables, actors in makeup, and wardrobe. Just a couple days before, Watson and Palmer had noticed a group of white students, perhaps fraternity brothers, being rowdy and loud in the same space, completely uninterrupted.

“It’s frustrating to me, the ways that black bodies are surveilled, even when we’re making art, even when we’re not going to do anything that’s going to harm anyone else,” says Watson.

“The idea that making art poses a threat to people, it’s frustrating, but it also…makes me feel very powerful,” she says. “Like, y’all are stressed that we’ll put something out in the world…that we’re using our voices. It’s a testament to what art can do, and how it can shake up spaces.”

Perhaps that’s why Watson just couldn’t take a break from writing.

Categories
Arts

Siding with vinyl: The pros and cons of Record Store Day

Perhaps you’ve seen them, the vinyl devotees. They live among us, frequently darting in and out of record stores and flea markets, some more conspicuous (and vocal) than others. But twice a year, on the Friday after Thanksgiving and a Saturday in April, many wake early and convene outside independent record shop doors. They line up—waiting with bated breath—for the chance to score a limited release on Record Store Day.

According to the Record Store Day website, a group of independent record shop owners launched the inaugural event in April 2008 to “celebrate the unique culture of a record store and the special role these independently owned stores play in their communities.”

In the decade-plus since, RSD has grown to include more than 1,400 shops in the U.S., plus thousands of others on six continents (Antarctica is the exception), offering more than 500 exclusive vinyl releases in April and more than 150 every November.

Three of Charlottesville’s independently-owned shops participate, and we wanted to know: Does the event actually honor record-store culture in the way it claims to? Yes and no.

Record Store Days are a lot of work for employees—the buying and the staffing (in some cases, it’s all the same, single person)—and prep begins months in advance.

Label and band offerings appear on an official RSD list that circulates among shop owners and buyers, with special releases ranging from a Barbarella soundtrack picture disc to a 180-gram mono pressing of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue to (yet another) previously unreleased Grateful Dead live set.

Buyers consider what might sell well—what regular customers would definitely or maybe want, and which releases might appeal to new customers (those exclusive Taylor Swift picture discs, for example)—and place orders. Customers can view the list at recordstoreday.com and make requests at their local shops as well.

But the boxes that arrive don’t always include what the shops order—perhaps they’ve ordered 10 copies of a Father John Misty EP pressed on heart-shaped red vinyl, but receive just three of the 5,700 made. Shops are not allowed to hold releases for customers; enthusiasts have to show up at the store, in person, on that day, to get the records they seek.

Not having the releases that customers want is one of the greatest frustrations of Record Store Day, says Cal Glattfelder, owner of Sidetracks Music. It’s difficult to tell an eager customer that the shop doesn’t have a particular release.

Plus, RSD is risky business for these small shops. They pay thousands of dollars up front for records that may or may not sell, and labels don’t take returns. Stores might not make their money back right away, if at all.

“I have ghosts of Record Store Days past floating all around the shop,” says Glattfelder. Some have been there a few years, he admits with a laugh.

A few releases “are like a bad penny; you just can’t get rid of them,” says Bob Schick, who buys for Plan 9 locations in Charlottesville and Richmond.

Others are highly coveted and show up for sale, usually at an inflated price, on Ebay or the online music database/marketplace Discogs as soon as lucky opportunists can list them.

That’s yet another drawback, says Schick. “Sometimes, I feel like the scarcity of some items make them more desirable than they might be. But that’s a really small quibble.”

Plan 9 tries to circumvent that, and help its customers out, by participating in a RSD releases exchange via the Coalition of Independent Music Stores—after the event, it will take customer requests and try to fulfill those requests via other brick-and-mortar stores across the country. “Whatever we can do to bring it in and keep it at the same price as the day,” says Schick.

The two Record Store Day events tend to be local shops’ busiest days of the year—Sidetracks and Plan 9 have more staff on hand, and Gwen Berthy, owner and sole employee of Melody Supreme, calls in his wife to help him out. Stores see a mix of regular customers, occasional customers, and those who come in just for the sale events.

In Berthy’s opinion, the opportunist shoppers who come in only twice a year for the special releases can cast a shadow on the event.

“I feel always a little sad when people only go see RSD stuff, then come to check out,” says Berthy. “They don’t look around to see my collection, to see what I’m doing [with my shop]. That’s pretty tough.”

After all, the personal interaction, be it through conversation or through the carefully selected records hanging out in the store bins, is what Record Store Day aims to celebrate.

Despite the mayhem, the reward can be great. And not just for business, but for the love of music. There’s almost always something truly precious that sets customer and shop staff hearts aflutter. This time around, for Schick, it’s cartoon music composer Raymond Scott’s The Jingle Workshop: Midcentury Musical Miniatures 1951-1965.

That’s why “we have to do it, because there’s always great stuff. There’s always something for someone,” says Berthy, who’s eager to have Seiche’s Demo Press, a hard psych record originally issued as a limited edition in 1981, in his hands on Friday. The original is quite rare (and thus wicked expensive), so to have a Record Store Day reissue created from the original master tapes and sold at a nice price, “is great,” says Berthy. “It’s just great.”

Categories
Living

Call it a night: Meet the people whose work days begin in the wee hours

Charlottesville’s never been known for its nightlife. Sure, there are some late-night restaurant-bars, and concerts, dance parties, and other entertainment events that go past midnight. Those who venture out in the dead of night, onto Charlottesville’s open streets and empty sidewalks, past closed businesses and dark houses, might say that the city is, well, dead.

But that’s not the case at all. Plenty of people are awake and active, particularly those working the night shift.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 15 million people in America work regular or sporadic night shifts—that’s about 5 percent of the country’s total population. For some, it’s a choice (they prefer to work at a time when they’ll mostly be left alone), for others, a necessity: A number of workers in this story have two, or even three, jobs. In some fields, night shifts do pay slightly more than day shifts.

Here in the Charlottesville area, many people work all night to make life easier, better, or safer, for others. Their labor often goes unnoticed and unappreciated, though, because it’s done when most people literally have their eyes shut.

Over several recent nights, photographer Eze Amos and I took at a peek at some of the things that go on in town long after the sun goes down. It’s a chance to get to know some of the people who do that work and see, just briefly, what their lives are like.

Photos by Eze Amos, words by Erin O’Hare

 

Click photo to enlarge

Kroger

The Kroger at Barracks Road Shopping Center is open 24 hours a day. And while the store’s not exactly humming with customers overnight, it is bustling with hustling employees.

Between the hours of 10:30pm and 7am, Kroger’s overnight staff restocks bags of potato chips and boxes of Pocky, cans of beans and bottles of beer, piles of apples and containers of almonds. They update price and sale tags, clean up the back room and storage areas, create end displays, unload nightly truck deliveries, and make sure in-store machinery runs smoothly. And, of course, they assist customers (like a Domino’s delivery guy) who shop after their own late shifts.

Mike Page has worked the night shift at Kroger for about four years now, and he likes it quite a bit. It pays better, he says, and having fewer customers in the store gives the staff a chance to build a really unique camaraderie. “We play when it’s time to play, and work when it’s time to work.”

Page is a shift lead, but he still straps scuffed knee pads over his work pants to push pallets and stock shelves alongside his colleagues. He manages truck deliveries, too, and on this particular night, he’s facing an unprecedented situation: both trucks (it’s a two-truck delivery night) are stuck in the shopping center parking lot, a mere few hundred feet from the Kroger delivery berth.

 

For safety reasons, the Department of Transportation limits freight and truck drivers to 11 hours of driving time before a mandatory 10-hour break. Page has had delivery trucks stop a few towns, or even just a few miles away, but never this close to the store; the trucks cannot legally drive the final few feet until the following morning. It might mean a longer in-store shift for Page and some other folks, but Page says he understands. They’ll make it work.


 

Click photo to enlarge

Newspaper delivery

Every Tuesday night, Dale Anderson waits for the call.

It comes late, usually around midnight, the indication that a few thousand copies of C-VILLE Weekly are hot off the press and ready for him to deliver. For the next 12 hours, Anderson will drive all over Charlottesville, putting weekly papers into blue boxes and designated racks, picking up any left over from the previous week’s delivery, and seeing which of C-VILLE’s magazines, such as Knife & Fork, Abode, and Unbound, need to be restocked at which locations. Then he stocks those, too.

He has to be purposeful about where he delivers, when: While most news-paper boxes are in public places, a number of racks are located inside buildings and businesses that aren’t open until the morning.

In addition to distributing for C-VILLE, Anderson delivers Crime Times and the Blue Ridge Buck Saver. He also owns and drives a taxi.

“It doesn’t hurt me none,” Anderson says about working night shifts that often extend into the morning, or even afternoon. “I’m only a four-hour sleeper anyway. I’m just used to it! My body likes four hours of sleep.” Maybe, he wonders out loud, because he and his wife have seven children, so he’s “used to being up and down” at all hours of the day and night.

Anderson started delivering more than 20 years ago, “back when newspapers were king” and daily deliveries kicked off somewhere around 2am. He worked for The Washington Post, and then The Hook (which merged with C-VILLE in 2011); now, he’s delivered for C-VILLE for so long that he knows every route by heart and is often the one to pick up other drivers’ routes when they’re on vacation or call out sick.

“The thing about working late at night is that it’s much easier. You don’t have people in your face, you don’t have traffic,” he says, laughing. “Charlottesville’s not a super happening town in the middle of the night.”


Click photo to enlarge

Emergency Communications Center

When Lisa Fitzgerald applied to work at the Charlottesville-UVA-Albemarle County Emergency Communications Center 31 years ago, she thought she’d just be answering phones. But during her yearlong training, she realized that taking 9-1-1 calls is a way to actively help people…just without the blood and guts. Now a public safety communications supervisor, she not only works a full-time shift load, she helps train new hires for the job she’s come to love.

Fitzgerald has worked days but she prefers nights, in part because night calls tend to be more urgent. “And it’s never the same night twice.” A couple weeks ago, she delivered a baby over the phone. The next night, she took a call for a shooting.

Fire, police, and EMS workers are often heralded as “first responders” for being the first to arrive on the scene of an incident. But “we’re answering the phone. We’re really the first ones,” says Fitzgerald of emergency call takers and dispatch operators. Depending on how an incident is handled over the phone—if she’s able to calm down a hysterical caller and get more information to relay over the radio—it can make a big difference for when fire, EMS, and police do arrive on the scene.

Full-time ECC employees like Fitzgerald work 12-hour shifts, and it’s not an easy job—each call is unique, some are very stressful, and call takers are under a lot of pressure to respond responsibly and well. It takes a year to be fully trained, longer if the ECC is shorthanded (as it has been recently) and needs experienced workers to take calls instead of teach trainees.

There’s often a personal price paid, too. Sleeping during the day can be difficult. It’s noisier, and more people are apt to contact Fitzgerald via phone or email, expecting an immediate reply. “People who don’t work the night shift don’t understand,” she says, adding that “family life suffers a bit, too,” though she says her two children have come to understand her unconventional schedule. For instance, she says, “Christmas is whatever day I’m off around Christmas. But I think I’d be bored doing anything else.”

 


 

Click photo to enlarge

Planet Fitness

Nighttime isn’t terribly busy inside the 24-hour Planet Fitness gym located inside 5th Street Station, says front desk clerk Christian George, with just a handful of people coming in after their own late work shifts. Activity picks up around 3:30am, when folks start to trickle in for their pre-work morning workouts. The televisions are always on, as is the music, and George is always busy—when she’s not greeting people who walk through the door, checking them in and tidying up the desk area, she’s doing gym-related paperwork. The 10pm to 4am overnight shift works well with her schedule—it’s a part-time gig for her; she also works at UVA hospital. During her shift, she often chats with Planet Fitness custodian Carl Monroe, who cleans during the overnight shift five nights a week.

Click photo to enlarge

“I love working in the gym because I talk a lot,” says Monroe (to knowing laughter from George). He likes to chat with customers as he cleans the 90-or-so machines, plus mats, mirrors, floors, bathrooms, and locker rooms. Monroe, who’s 62, worked at Gold’s Gym on Hydraulic Road for years; when Gold’s closed, he was worried that, at his age, he wouldn’t be able to find a job, as businesses seem to prefer to hire younger workers. “How are older folks supposed to live?” he asks.

“This is one of the cleanest gyms out there,” says Monroe. “We take pride in it, but we don’t get the credit for it.” He notes that when he’s not at work, people ask where he’s been.

It’s true, says George. Customers want to know if he’s okay…and they notice when the gym hasn’t received Monroe’s golden touch.


 

Click photo to enlarge

Omni Hotel/UVA Hospital

Joseph Sesay arrived in Charlottesville in August 2004. One month later, he started working as a bellman at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel, and he’s been there ever since, working the second shift, 2:30 to 11pm. He escorts guests to their rooms, gives them the rundown of amenities available at the hotel (indoor pool, outdoor pool, bar and restaurant, fitness center, etc.) and in the immediate vicinity. He makes sure guests have their luggage, enough towels, anything else they may need or want. It’s not heavy work—talking with guests is mostly quite enjoyable, says Sesay, who came to Charlottesville as a refugee from Sierra Leone.

Sesay’s heavy work begins after his Omni shift, when he heads directly to his second full-time job as a housekeeping team lead at the University of Virginia hospital. He inspects all of the recently vacated rooms on floors three through eight, assessing whether they’ve been cleaned well and with the appropriate chemicals based on what’s happened in the room. Sometimes, as is the case with labor and delivery, there’s a lot to clean up—extra sheets, blood, other bodily tissues and fluids. When the morning shift takes over at 7:30, Sesay’s done with room inspections, but he still has to do payroll. He gets home around 8:30am, goes to bed around 9:30, and manages to sleep for about 4 hours until he gets up to return to the Omni.

Working two full-time jobs, Sesay’s got to be tired. “At times, I am,” he admits. But he does it to support his family—his wife and daughter here in the States as well as his sister and her three children back in Sierra Leone; all three kids are doing spectacularly in school and in their trade programs, Sesay says, smiling.

On his precious days off, he cooks.


 

Click photo to enlarge

Lucky 7

Lucky 7 is the only 24-hour food spot in downtown Charlottesville, so it’s a bit of a destination. The 10pm to 7am night shift isn’t slow, but it’s not terribly busy, either, says Ron Jude, who’s worked at the convenience store for a few weeks now. “It’s something to do to keep me occupied, keep me out of the house,” he says.

There’s a fairly steady stream of customers and a nightly pre-midnight rush when folks come in to buy cigarettes and alcohol before sale of the latter is prohibited per state liquor laws. Things pick up again a bit after 2am, as bars let out and customers are looking for a bite to eat, or for more alcohol (when they can’t buy it at that hour, says Jude, some people try to steal it). Many of the store’s nighttime customers are homeless folks or people stopping in after working their own late-night jobs.

Jude’s lived in Charlottesville off and on for about 30 years, and he says that while Charlottesville’s not as “crazy” as other places he’s lived, Lucky 7 customers still manage to surprise him, like a guy who recently came in flamboyantly dressed, fresh from a rave (yes, a rave…in Charlottesville).


 

Click photo to enlarge

Red Carpet Inn

Travis Hilton says his job is “pretty boring 99 percent of the time.”

The 11:30pm-7:30am front desk shift at the Red Carpet Inn on Route 29 is relatively quiet. Hilton, the night auditor, spends most of that time doing the hotel’s general accounting, though he’s occasionally summoned to check in guests (between three and eight on a regular night, upwards of a dozen on UVA basketball and football game weekends), and tote bottles of shampoo, extra towels, and rollaway beds to one of the hotel’s 115 rooms.

Hilton started working hotel night shifts when he was in high school. In his 20-plus years in the industry, he’s learned that those hotels with ballrooms, event spaces, and full-service bars and restaurants are more active at night (this isn’t the case at the Red Carpet Inn). He’s seen his share of drunken antics, and at least one room completely destroyed by cats (it required a complete reupholster). He’s seen a drug bust go down, too, but he says his stories aren’t nearly as flashy as those his boss has told about working at a hotel across the street from the Pentagon, where there were tales of car chases and briefcase switches.


 

Click photo to enlarge

Parking lot cleaning

From about 9pm to 7am most nights of the week, Brian (who asked that we not used his last name) drives a truck for Sweeping Corporation of America, sweep-cleaning the asphalt and replacing garbage can liners in shopping center parking lots all over town (like 5th Street Station and Barracks Road Shopping Center, to name just a couple). It’s a fairly quiet job, one best accomplished at night when there’s not a lot of traffic in the lots. But there’s always someone in every lot, he says. People traveling in RVs often park in shopping center lots overnight, as do people who live in their cars. Teenagers, he’s noticed, tend to hang out in movie theater parking lots.

Brian is quick to point out that “everything in life requires a job to be done.” When he brings his truck back to the garage at the end of his shift, someone else is going to wash it, he says. A third person will put air in the tires and make sure that everything’s running smoothly under the hood. And so on, and so on.


 

Click photo to enlarge

Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport

By 3 o’clock in the morning, a few passengers are already waiting to check in for their flights at Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport…but there aren’t any staff in the place yet. That is, except for Steve, the morning shuttle bus driver who picks up airline, runway, and TSA staff from the employee parking lot and delivers them to the terminal to prep for the first flights.

Steve, who lives in Culpeper and has driven the CHO shuttle bus for seven years, wakes at 1am in order to arrive on time for his 12-hour shift. He knows every staff member who gets on the shuttle, greeting almost all of them by name and asking if there’s anyone left in the parking lot so as not to make them wait 10 minutes for his next loop. He inquires after children and grandchildren, and happily answers questions about his own grandbaby (who just turned 2).

Most airport workers have two jobs, Steve explains. One man works on the runway from 4-8am before heading to work at CVS, where he’s a manager. One young airline desk and gate attendant is a high school student, who comes in to work that 4-8am shift before heading to homeroom. “He’s an amazing young man, really intelligent,” says Steve, and damn good at his job. “One day, we’ll look back and say ‘we knew him when.’”

Most of them also do it for the flight benefits. One airline gate agent who drives over from Harrisonburg every morning says that her airline job allows her to visit her daughter in Houston a few times a year, something she might not be able to do otherwise. Hers is a pretty common story, says Steve.

By 4 o’clock—just one hour later—CHO is up and running. Taxis and hotel buses and cars pull up to the terminal doors to drop off travelers. Desk agents check bags and boarding passes as TSA agents run security checks. Concession stand workers brew coffee and make breakfast sandwiches near the gates, and out on the runway, more workers (including air traffic control) ready the planes for takeoff.


Click photo to enlarge

Insomniac

The older Sean Tubbs gets, the more he yearns for an early bedtime. Most nights, he can get to sleep early, but he can’t seem to get the recommended eight consecutive hours.

After working as a journalist for many years, where he often had to stay up very late or wake very early to cover an event or make a deadline, Tubbs is used to running on maybe four hours of sleep a night. And while he’s no longer a journalist (he currently works as a field representative for the Piedmont Environmental Council) he says he still can’t manage to sleep more than a few hours at a time and is often awake at 3am.

At that hour, he tunes in to the industrial hum coming from the nearby UVA hospital, or the sound of the Pegasus helicopter whirring to its landing pad. Most nights, he hears the rumble of a dump truck, or a fox screaming in the field behind his house. In the summer, he hears mockingbirds.

Tubbs knows he’s not the only insomniac in town: Through his windows, he notices a “surprising amount of people” awake, driving and walking through the neighborhood.

He prefers to wander around his house in the wee hours, “relishing” his thinking time. He resists picking up his phone to tweet about public transportation, and while he tries not to work (something he’d have done were he still reporting), he does allow himself to think about work.

“I think about what my day’s going to be, the challenges I’m going to have. It’s useful, that kind of worry.”

After a couple hours, Tubbs is sleepy enough to return to bed.

Categories
Arts Uncategorized

Song stories: Jordan Perry discusses the motivations for his resonant guitar compositions

Jordan Perry’s been here before. He doesn’t mean physically here, at The Pie Chest on High Street, where we meet for an afternoon coffee—he means he’s already done this interview.

Last night, he had a dream about it. While he can’t recall the full content, Perry remembers, “in no weird dream terms,” telling me the detailed story of how he got his first real guitar.

Perhaps it was a premonition, I tell him, because the first question I prepared for him is, When did you first pick up a guitar?

“That’s hilarious. Oh, that’s great,” he says, chuckling and setting his coffee cup down as he launches into the story.

Perry spent many summers in Blacksburg, Virginia, with his grandma, an enthusiastic pack rat who kept just about everything; most rooms were treasure troves of junk and family relics. When he was about 9 years old, he was digging through her attic and came across a 1960s Kimberly electric guitar with a black and red sunburst body, a “super ornate” pickguard, and “an obscene amount of switches.”

Perry rushed downstairs and asked his grandma if he could have the guitar. “I’ll have to call [your uncle],” she said.

“Can you call him today?” Perry asked, eager to make the instrument his own. He’d played violin, and even had a toy guitar when he was a toddler, but with the Kimberly slung around his shoulder, he says he “definitely felt cool.”

And it made him feel like writing music. Perry’s been composing on guitar ever since (another dream turned reality, if you will), and he’ll play some of those original pieces at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Friday night.

It’s difficult to label Perry’s solo material. Experimental instrumental guitar is perhaps the closest classification, as Perry says the music comes out of “literally experimenting…following curiosity.” But that doesn’t completely describe what Perry’s written for his two solo records so far, both his 2016 eponymous debut and 2018’s Witness Tree.

In high school in Harrisonburg and later while living in Philadelphia he played music both on his own and in bands with friends. He played in grungy bands, a pop punk band, and a series of punk and hardcore groups (like Eat Forever and My Mind) that occasionally also drew inspiration from the baroque pop-rock of acts like The Kinks. Simultaneously, Perry got into traditional folk music, particularly music from the English folk revival of the 1960s, artists like Shirley Collins and The Watersons. Then, while formally studying music at Shenandoah University and later Temple University, Perry got really into classical guitar while also playing in a riff-y stoner rock band, Heavy Sons.

The physicality of classical guitar’s fingerpicking resonated with Perry, and he started writing solo material informed by the technique—early versions of what he’s playing now (though he kept playing in rock bands, playing guitar and writing lyrics for Charlottesville twee-boogie group New Boss).

“There’s a lot of stuff at work” in his instrumental guitar compositions, he says, and not just because of his myriad musical influences (experiences like living abroad in Palestine for two years come into it, too, he says). But Perry hesitates to say what this music is or is not. He prefers to talk instead about how he makes it.

Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith

He comes up with “musical gestures, impressions,” and strings them together “in kind of a narrative way.” Perry’s interested in “the little bit of movement there,” and in “the kind of extraneous friction sounds that can happen on the guitar from some less consonant intervals rubbing together and creating this kind of throbbing sound that comes through sometimes and sometimes doesn’t.” He’ll create fret-hand finger pattern loops over a melody to encourage that.

Perry often composes based on the feeling he gets from the place he’s in at that moment. It’s later, once he’s practicing or performing, that the depth of those impressions comes into focus. A composition created amidst the smell, the sound, the scene of tidal flats in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, can end up containing—in its atmosphere, and Perry’s use of tension and release—symbolism about rising sea levels.

On his first record, Perry says he created “a basic compositional vocabulary” for himself, and within that vocabulary, he came to “a realization of some kind of voice” on Witness Tree. As he begins to tug at the thread of his next record, he says he plans to use that voice to explore and expand his singular compositional vocabulary.

“Someone said there’s a textual aspect [to the music], and that feels kind of right,” says Perry before taking a sip of coffee.

Now I’m the one with a bit of déjà vu—in a previous article for C-VILLE, I described the experience of listening to Witness Tree as “not unlike reading a series of related short stories.” We laugh about it for a moment before Perry ruminates a little further on instinct and music.

“What happens if you trust a little bit in this meager language that you’ve created for yourself?” he asks. “I’m interested in pushing it, becoming more fluid about that idea.”


Guitarist Jordan Perry will perform his solo work at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on November 8. The Ambient Eye and WolfRavenTagCloud share the bill.