In the shorter days leading to the solstice, things can get gloomy, but for the group of artists featured in Let There Be Light, the darkness offers inspiration. From glowing jellyfish constellations to the hidden world of woodland creatures, the art installations and performances at the annual event are a testament to the bright artistic minds of our community.
Artist Melissa Cooke Benson’s explorations in portraiture, long inspired by her daily life, have aligned with geographical moves, new and different cityscapes and cultures and alterations in her interior life, too. “With each life transition,” she says, “I’ve had to digest what’s going on around me and think of a way of incorporating what I do into those new surroundings.”
Her latest work comes after moving from New York to Minnesota and birthing her daughter, now 2 years old. While Benson has gone through phases of withdrawing as the subject of her artwork, when she became a mom, she says, “The body became very relevant again because everything I was dealing with was very corporeal. I began exploring what it means to be a mom and caregiver and have the entire self taken over by a small human for a while.”
“Mom Brain”
Second Street Gallery
Through May 11
In the title piece, “Mom Brain, 2018” Benson plays with the motif of a beautiful French braid, one of many, she says, that realists gravitate toward. “I like taking those tropes and putting them on their head. This is my French braid. My hair covered in stickers, Cheerios, crumbs, with lots of flyaways, standing in our bathroom that I tiled at 32 weeks pregnant,” she says.
The image was partially inspired when she and her husband, artist Erik Benson (whose exhibition “Monument” also appears at Second Street Gallery through May 11), invited a group of collectors to their respective home studios. While speaking with the collectors about her work, Benson, tending to her ill child who was 18 months old and teething, says she thought she was multitasking rather well until her friend pointed out after the fact that her daughter had been wiping snot in her hair the entire time.
“‘Mom Brain’,” Benson says, is about “the moment when you feel like you’re totally on point as a mom and then you leave the house and realize you have stickers on your butt or snot in your hair.”
In “Fringe,” a detailed rendering of one quarter of her head, Benson looks closely at the physical effects of childbirth, in this case, hair loss and regrowth. Six months postpartum, Benson started losing a lot of hair. One day she lifted her bangs to see a “fringe fresh halo of hair” growing underneath. The portrait, she says, is “based on a photo I took on my iPhone when I was using my phone as a mirror. It’s a quiet, reflective moment that’s kind of vulnerable and has a certain moodiness to it with the laundry and baby crib behind me.”
One motivation for this series of portraits, she explains, “is making artwork that’s not that ideal image of parenthood but those realistic things that only your girlfriends tell you about being a mom.”
While Benson’s portraits may look like pencil drawings, she actually creates them with graphite and a dry brush—a technique, she says, that was “born essentially out of frustration and experimentation.” When she was in graduate school, several professors insisted she took too long to complete drawings. Three people over the course of two months asked her if she’d tried using graphite. She happened to have a can of it sitting in her studio and “it felt essentially like fate,” says Benson. She took a watercolor brush and began dusting the graphite onto paper. “Four hours later, I left the studio looking like Pig-Pen, totally covered in graphite and totally excited, like I’d found my passion.”
Nine years ago I reviewed an exhibition at the Fralin Art Museum featuring the work of William Christenberry. Included in the show was his “Klan Room Tableau,” a peculiar installation of dolls dressed in KKK robes. According to Christenberry, the highly personal work was his means of exposing and exorcising the hatred and violence of the Ku Klux Klan, which he had experienced while photographing the South. A heavy velvet curtain concealed the piece from those who might be offended. How long ago that seems, when today, we have real Klansmen walking up Charlottesville’s Market Street in broad daylight spewing racist and anti-Semitic hate.
The time couldn’t be more right for a show by Lisa Beane.
Beane has always addressed challenging political and social issues, but with “Karma,” which centers on privileged racism, you sense the gloves have come off. Beane is fed up. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘Wow, you’re so angry,’ after seeing the [Robert E.] Lee painting,” she says. “I told him, ‘Really? No, I just hate the way racist, privileged people treat others and how long they have gotten away with it. Just because I stand up against them doesn’t make me angry, I just tell the truth.’”
Part of that truth telling involves holding a mirror up to society to reveal its very worst. In this case, it’s the more than 4,000 lynchings that happened in the United States between 1877 and 1950. These events frequently took on a carnival atmosphere with women and children in attendance. Crowds as big as 15,000 were reported at some. And these weren’t mere hangings. Victims would be tortured with brands, their limbs broken, and some were burned alive.
That despicable history is contained in vintage postcards that were part of a thriving souvenir industry that rose up around lynchings. The fact that there were lynchings is bad enough. To then realize that photos were taken and postcards made and sent, complete with glib messages, just makes it all so much more sickening.
Working from actual postcards, Beane extracts text and images to construct her paintings. Recurring imagery includes the lynching spectators and stamps in the upper right or left corners.
Lisa Beane ‘‘Karma’’
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Through January 13
“There Once Was a Boy Hanging from a Tree” draws you in on account of its rather unusual composition. The left part of the work is taken up by a long passage of text, while the right is oddly empty. It’s the exact space where the boy of the title would be hanging, bordered in the lower front by the rabble rendered in dramatic silhouette and a frightened, sad Pooh and Tigger above. The dramatic and unexpected void attracts attention to what’s missing. The boy is separated out, within the stamp in the upper right and a shower of confetti-like dots surround him, referring to the stardust in all of us, no matter what race. Beane has beatified the martyred boy with a halo and the narrow rectangle he inhabits resembles a religious icon.
Bound in embellished leather, “The Book” is an extraordinarily dense assemblage of image, media and message inspired by the attack on an 8-year-old biracial boy in Claremont, New Hampshire, who was set upon lynching-style by a gang of teenagers in August. Its 18 double-sided pages are Beane’s powerful indictment of racial hatred. Each page is a heartbreaking tour de force of execution and expression that rails against a world where children like the New Hampshire boy or Emmett Till are attacked (and in the latter’s case, killed) because of the color of their skin.
Beane uses a combination of image and writing against animated passages of paint. She builds her surfaces up with slashing brushstrokes, swaths of color, drips, glazes, pointillist daubs. In some works, she adds pieces of wood. The effect is a frenetic urgency that matches the artist’s and reflects the roiling chaos of the current political climate.
Beane has a poet’s touch when it comes to language, using words and expressions like barbs that strike just the right emotional chord, and populates her work with a cast of characters drawn from fairy tales and cartoons that represent goodness and innocence—and as such function as a de facto moral compass.
“A big underlying point to this work is ‘Do unto others,’” says Beane. “The concept of karma—it all comes back to you, and at the end of the day we all have to answer for the good and the bad we have done to one another. All of these paintings show the need for accepting individual responsibility for society’s distorted view of privileged racism.”
Artist Sharon Shapiro has a unique history with the Welcome Gallery, where her exhibition “Above Ground” opens this week. Now operated by New City Arts Initiative, the space served as her art studio from 1996—when she first moved to Charlottesville from Atlanta—until 2001. Fittingly, her exhibition is themed on nostalgia—or the disruption of it—in an examination the American dream.
“Nostalgia is such a seductive trap,” Shapiro says. “There’s something compelling about it but it’s also really dangerous. There’s a dark side to always yearning for what was, but something comforting about it, too,” she says. “Were things ever really as good as we remember?”
Shapiro, who now works out of her home studio in Louisa, grew up in the small railroad town of Bluefield, West Virginia. “My father had a clothing store my whole childhood and I would sit in his store and draw the mannequins and clothes,” she says. While studying fashion illustration at VCU, she fell in love with painting and ultimately obtained a bachelor’s of fine art from Atlanta College of Art.
Most of her paintings are figurative and arise from found photos, the history of which “changes within the context of my work,” Shapiro says. The pieces in this exhibition began with a search she did on eBay for vintage photographs of swimming pools and backyards in 1970s America. “It’s odd in the first place that people are selling their family photos,” she says. “There’s something about it that’s quirky to begin with.” From this beginning she layered other scenes to create composites and juxtaposed color with black and white to play with the texture of our emotional lives and memories. This layered and distorted quality erodes the would-be sentiment and reshapes it into something edgier. Whether it is a figure out of proportion with her landscape, like the truncated woman in “Swan Lake,” or the blurred and duplicated figures in “Devils” and “Holiday,” Shapiro challenges our simplistic view of the past.
“I’m fascinated by the idea of the American dream,” she says. “The idea of the suburbs, everything all kind of alike…There’s something off-putting about that too. It’s not real. We’re trying to make things look perfect. Things never are. Especially human relationships.” This interest in the tension between outer appearance and interior drama reminds her of something her grandmother used to say: “Don’t believe anything you hear and half of what you see.” To this end, she investigates the meaning we ascribe to objects, specifically the above-ground pool as “a class signifier.”
In “How the West Was Won” a young girl jumping into a pool is suspended in mid-air. Her face is in color but her body is black and white, the toe of her Mary Jane shoe dripping onto a lounge chair. “Things might be unraveling,” Shapiro says. “I like that aspect in my work.” In “Cure for Pain” there is both innocence and a self-consciousness about its precariousness as two girls in pink bathing suits and swim caps look over the edge of a kiddie pool. There is something not entirely wholesome about the pool, the metal bars of which are visible beneath its canvas. And a sense of foreboding expresses itself in the exaggerated, claw-like shadows of the girls’ hands.
Interestingly, while Shapiro is preoccupied with water in these paintings, she says, “I’ve always had a fear of water. Since I was little, I’ve been simultaneously fascinated and scared.” It is this vulnerability of youth and the threat to innocence that ripples throughout the exhibition as Shapiro qualifies our romanticized view of the past.