Tag: Bolanle Adeboye

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Arts Culture

Letting it flow

Bolanle Adeboye’s “Rain Dancer” is part of “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience,” which features work by 25 Black artists from across Virginia. The exhibition is on display at McGuffey Art Center through March 28. Photo courtesy of the artist

By Alana Bittner

When writer and photographer Kori Price agreed to be part of the curation committee for a Black artists’ exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, water was not on her mind. It didn’t come up until someone asked how they wanted viewers to move through the gallery. Price recalls discussing ways to make viewers feel like they were underwater: “How did we want them to feel? Should they follow a specific route through the space? How should they flow through?”

Those questions evoked sobering scenes for Price. Water signified the Middle Passage, the expanse of ocean that was used for trans-Atlantic slave trade, into which an unknown number of Africans jumped rather than endure bondage.

But water is also present in moments of joy and release, strength and protest. Price says the committee, which also includes Derrick Waller, Sahara Clemons, Dena Jennings, Jae Johnson, Tobiah Mundt, and Lillie Williams, soon realized it was the perfect metaphor for framing such a broad topic, and agreed on “Water: The Agony and Ecstasy of the Black Experience” for the show’s title.

The group intentionally kept the requirements for the participating artists simple, asking only for interpretations on the theme. The results are wide-ranging and surprising. The show features painting, photography, and film, plus banjos carved from dipping gourds. In the films of Ellis Finney, water symbolizes the flow of time and memory. For painter Clinton Helms, the theme manifests as a powerful thunderstorm, while Bolanle Adeboye captures the joy of a young girl playing in the rain. Yet despite the range of subjects, Price marvels at how “each individual piece flowed together as a cohesive unit in the show.”

Waller, a photographer, says that initially, he had no idea where to begin in creating his art for the show. The challenge encouraged him to step out of his comfort zone and pick up a paint brush. The discussions involving the trans-Atlantic slave trade had imprinted one quote in particular on his mind. In Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan’s character Killmonger says, “Nah… Just bury me in the ocean…with my ancestors that jumped from the ship…cuz they knew death was better than bondage.” Waller’s resulting work, “Death Was Better Than Bondage,” is a haunting tribute to those who jumped. Black pins are scattered across a background as blue as the sea, marking the lives lost to the waves.

When Price discovered that the first slave ship to the mainland colonies, the White Lion, landed in present-day Hampton, Virginia, she grabbed her camera and drove down to visit. The experience was moving, and resurfaced questions about her own past. “Like many Black Americans, there’s likely not a record of who my enslaved ancestors were or when they gained their freedom,” Price says. “Though I don’t know them by name, I think about them…and wonder who the more than 20 Africans were that walked off the White Lion and became our legacy.” Price’s “Shadow of 20. and Odd Negroes” shows ethereal shadows cast upon a deserted beach, stretching almost to the ocean beyond.

As submissions came in, the McGuffey committee noticed that many of the participating artists were showing work for the first time. Waller says that in talking with the artists it became clear that opportunities for Black artists to show their work were limited. For Waller, this affirmed a troubling trend. In his experience, it’s been “very rare to attend an art show that is totally focused on celebrating the talents of Black artists.”

During the curation process, the committee members began to discuss the role they could play in helping Black artists get connected with opportunities to show their work, and eventually decided to present the show as the product of a new organization: the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. Waller says that “helping Black artists gain exposure will be at the core” of CBAC’s mission.

“Water” shows just how valuable that exposure is. By featuring a variety of Black voices, the exhibit captures the nuances and multiplicities of the Black experience, something missing from white-domintated art spaces.

“I think that people can make a mistake in interpreting the Black experience as a singular and stereotyped experience,” says Price. She hopes viewers can “leave with a better understanding of our complexities.”

For Waller, “Water” touches on something fundamental. “I think the show will make people feel,” he says, “whatever that emotion may be…joy, sadness, anger, peace. I want people to feel. And then I hope these feelings spark good conversation and dialogue.”

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Arts

Seeing new stories: Bolanle Adeboye lights up a moment in untitled show at Live Arts

Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Our ability to look at art—to see color, shape, texture—comes from light.

We’ll spare you an in-depth science lesson, but most basically, light reflects off objects and into the eye. Cells in the retina (at the back of the eye) convert light into electrical impulses, which the optic nerve sends to the brain. The brain then produces the image we see.

“It all derives from light,” says visual artist Bolanle Adeboye. “I’m just fascinated by it.”

Adeboye is always painting light: the way it falls across a child’s cheek, the way it flickers in the night sky, how it traverses the surface of a bubble. And in her newest works, 11 light box paintings currently on view at Live Arts, light illuminates not just these paintings, but the path of her creative journey.

For this untitled series, Adeboye scanned a number of her original paintings and digitally collaged them together into new vignettes. She had the resulting images printed onto backlit film, a thin, transparent plastic material commonly used for those glowing fast-food menus and bus station advertisements. Once she had the prints, she slid them into light boxes—essentially low-profile flat panel ceiling lights ubiquitous in office buildings—for display on the second and third floors of Live Arts, between the large windows overlooking Water Street.

Those familiar with Adeboye’s work will see that many of her usual motifs—sunrises, sunsets, night skies, water, bubbles, forest scenes, flowers, trees, children—are present in this series, combined in new ways, to tell new stories.

In “Park Kids,” a little girl spray paints a sign near a parking garage, a water tower looming large in the background. A little boy kneels on the ground near a sapling growing out of a crack in the pavement—has he planted it, or broken the pavement to make room for its growth? In their eyes, all it takes to turn a parking lot into a park is to “declare it,” says Adeboye. Spray paint the sign and nurture the tree, to make it so. “In real life, nothing is that simple, but the way kids approach problems simplifies them in a way that I think is beautiful, even if it’s not entirely practical,” she says. “And that’s what art is, pretty much.”

Children often create with boundless emotion and without self-consciousness, says Adeboye, and she finds that inspiring—painting children is her constant reminder to do the same.

One example is “Dawn Soon,” which Adeboye made in the wake of her friend (local sculptor) Gabe Allan’s death in March of this year. In it, a transparent, headless man walks alone at night down a thickly wooded path. Adeboye’s not sure why the man has no head—it just happened while she was making it—but she knows the piece is about losing oneself “to the big expanse.” There’s something foreboding and dark about it, she says, but there’s a lot of light, and lightness, too.

As Adeboye created these works—paintings digitized and essentially presented on screens—she says she thought a lot about 3D and special effects used in movies and television, how they “get more and more and more and more intense, with all the motion.” At first glance, the light boxes look like screens. A viewer might expect the moon in “The Players” to spin like a disco ball. Or for the bubbles in the “Sink and Swim” diptych to float to the surface outside the frame as the nearby clusters of neon flowers rock back and forth in the tide. The images are visually still, but we expect them to move, and Adeboye’s interested in that dissonance.

She wondered about the power of having one moment, rather than a whole series of moments, to tell a story. “It’s an exercise in forcing me to try and figure it out: If you’re only going to do one moment, it has to be the right moment,” she says.

And so Adeboye’s work lights up moments that stir plenty of intellectual and emotional movement, a phenomenon of light that is not exactly explicable by science.

What’s more, this experimental series has sparked new creative movement for the artist. Adeboye’s found that she likes working digitally. She can dial down the cyan and boost the magenta on a flower petal and decide whether she likes it or not before hitting delete, a freedom that’s practically impossible to explore in paint. But she can’t imagine leaving painting behind entirely.

“Ideally, I’d always want to ride the line between the two,” says Adeboye, adding that the light box pieces work precisely because the textures are created physically, with paint and the painting surface. The combination of digital and physical media opens up a rather free, very wide, playful world that Adeboye’s game to romp around.

“At this point, I’m just trusting that none of this stuff is a destination,” she says about the light boxes and what viewers might see in her future shows. “The path is so much longer.”

Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. She’ll have a closing reception, with a performance by cellist (and Adeboye’s housemate) Wes Swing, on June 8.

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Arts Living

Of two minds: Housemates cohabitate and collaborate

For cellist and songwriter Wes Swing and visual artist Bolanle Adeboye, living in the same Woolen Mills house has resulted in plenty of creative collaboration. Photo: John Robinson

Sitting on a bench full of pillows at a large, round wooden table she made with her own hands, Bolanle Adeboye smears veggie cream cheese on both halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel. The visual artist is fighting a cold, and her housemate, cellist and songwriter Wes Swing, asks if she’d prefer a cup of coffee or a mug of tea to soothe her throat.

Coffee, Adeboye answers. Definitely coffee.

As Swing brews coffee, they try to figure out (upon this reporter’s prompting) when they met. Adeboye can’t quite remember when, but Swing’s pretty sure he knows. It was 2009, maybe 2010, and Swing was playing a show at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Swing noticed that Adeboye was drawing.

Adeboye told Swing that she liked drawing to music, and Swing asked to see what she’d made.  He was intrigued by her work, and they talked art for a while.

Holding a hot mug of coffee in both hands, Adeboye is touched by the fact that Swing remembers that interaction so clearly. “I do remember being blown away by your music the first time I heard it,” she tells Swing. “It was like magic.”

That drawing was perhaps their first collaboration, though an unofficial one. At the time, neither artist had any idea that they’d end up housemates, a living situation that has led to a fruitful creative partnership.

At that point, Adeboye was living in the downstairs apartment of a house in Woolen Mills, a space she’d shared since 2002 with a variety of roommates, all artists of some kind. Not long after making album art for Swing’s 2011 album Through A Fogged Glass, and an animated video for the song “Lullaby,” Adeboye was looking for a new roommate, and Swing, who was looking for a place to live, seemed cool enough to her.

After all, Adeboye says, laughing, she’d heard “Lullaby” a thousand times or more at that point, and she knew she could live with his music.

Adeboye has owned the Woolen Mills house since 2003, and has been slowly renovating it. In 2017, she moved up to the second floor and Swing, who’d briefly left to live in San Francisco, moved back in and took over the first floor apartment. Now the two hang out together, on both levels, often.

On this particular morning, late winter sun shines through the first floor windows, soaking the entire place in beams of light; it’s a veritable showroom for Adeboye’s craftsmanship and vision. She designed the open but cozy floor plan, made much of the furniture and accent pieces (including light fixtures), and covered the walls with her paintings and mixed-media pieces. It’s all “driven by available repurposed and salvaged building materials, determined by ever-shifting function,” says Adeboye of the abode.

“It’s like waking up in an art gallery,” says Swing, who feels constantly comforted and inspired by the house…so much so, that he likes to stay home, and as a result, he makes a lot of music. “It’s the perfect space for making stuff,” he adds.

What’s more, says Adeboye, the home and its décor constantly evolves, so “you have to be comfortable with chaos and uncertainty and change.”

“’Live with it.’ That’s the motto here,” says Swing.

And they do. The sonorous sound of Swing’s cello drifts upstairs to Adeboye’s ears, where she’s usually working on her own apartment (it’s still a work-in-progress), or on one of her fine-art pieces. Adeboye has put a lot of time and thought into creating her living environment, making real her longtime vision for how her life would look, feel, and sound. Strangely enough, she says, when she thought of the sound aspect, she imagined cello. Adeboye didn’t grow up playing an instrument, but she always loved music, and cello in particular.

Adeboye puts down her bagel and puts her hand over her heart. “This is just making me so grateful for my life,” she says to Swing. “I thought I was going to marry a cellist, but instead I just live with one. I don’t actually have to marry one, which is awesome,” she says, laughing.

Swing knows Adeboye’s home when he hears her walking around upstairs or playing electric guitar; Adeboye knows Swing’s home when she hears him playing cello or singing. There’s no setting a time to meet and discuss ideas. All it takes is walking up or down the stairs when inspiration (which can be a vulnerable state of being) strikes. Living in close proximity has cultivated trust in many forms.

They often tackle maintenance projects together (most recently a broken dryer), and there’s no hassle over collecting the rent.

Over time, the nature of their collaboration has evolved from Adeboye creating visuals to and for Swing’s recorded music and live performances into something more intertwined.

Their most recent collaboration, “Now/Now,” is an interactive project in which Adeboye and Swing, along with their audience, produce real-time musical and visual representations of the audience’s reported emotional states. So far, they’ve brought iterations of it into local schools and jails, to various community art performances, and to a school for the deaf and blind in Florida. Each time, it’s a little different, depending on the participants, but the core—the idea of being and creating in the moment, with the people around you—remains the same.

“It took a lot for me to be willing to go there,” says Swing about the intensely collaborative nature of “Now/Now.” He says that before working with Adeboye—who brings chalkboards and sticks of chalk to her visual art shows so that people can react creatively to what she’s doing—he hesitated to work with other artists of any kind, lest they misunderstand or misinterpret his vision. Swing now sees that relinquishing some of that control can yield some pretty spectacular results.

Adeboye says that Swing’s transformed her work, too—she consciously incorporates more interactivity, she’s branching out into other media (such as light boxes), and she’s taught herself to play electric guitar.

Collaboration is such a natural thing for them that they begin a new one as they polish off their breakfast. Swing tells Adeboye that while lying in bed the previous night, he imagined the inside of the Woolen Mills Chapel filled floor to ceiling with her projections.

Adeboye chews her last bite of bagel, thinks it over. “Alright, we’ll talk,” she says, giggling as she realizes: They already are.

Categories
Arts

Launching a movement: Wes Swing leaves it all to interpretation for Upswept

Wes Swing accompanies Katharine Birdsall’s choreography with an original composition for Upswept at UVA’s spring dance concert, April 12-14. Photo by Kristen Finn, courtesy the artist

On his first day of college, Wes Swing rented a cello.

There was something about the instrument that called to him. Perhaps it was the vocal quality, its aural proximity to the human voice; perhaps it was the instrument’s ability to express a particularly full range of emotion, with its deep, full lows and intense, airy highs. Perhaps it was the way the cello is played, the embrace of the instrument in order to draw sound from its curved shoulders and round belly, from the strings on its slender neck.

That rented cello wasn’t Swing’s first go-round with a stringed instrument, but it was one he longed for. Growing up in Clifton, Virginia, Swing started playing classical violin, and by age 6, he was performing concerts for his entire school. When he was 12, he picked up a guitar and got into grunge and punk rock.

All that time Swing wanted to be playing cello, but his parents told him that the violin was enough. Swing wonders if his parents’ refusal was some kind of reverse psychology. “They refused me, which I think is the best motivation for kids…” he says, laughing. Intentional or not, it worked, because once Swing picked up the cello, he couldn’t put it down.

Swing currently has an eponymous cello and electro-folk project, Wes Swing, with guitarist and electronic musician Jeff Gregerson; he recently composed music for writer and Invisibilia podcaster Lulu Miller’s reading from her book, “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” and with funding from a New City Arts Charlottesville SOUP grant, Swing and local visual artist Bolanle Adeboye are working on an interactive project, “Now/Now,” where they produce music and visuals of people’s emotional states. Next month, he’ll do a Townes Van Zandt cover show and this summer he’ll compose music as part of Experimental Film Virginia’s summer residency on the Eastern Shore.

This week, at the University of Virginia drama department’s spring dance concert, Swing will perform a cello-and-loop piece that he composed for choreographer Katharine Birdsall’s dance piece, Upswept. Swing says that the 14-minute composition is unlike anything he’s written before.

Upswept began with Birdsall’s desire to work with pattern in movement, her curiosity about how and why movements make the shapes they do. She says that she makes movements first, then discovers the meaning within them over time, preferring to have live music composed for her original pieces, because “with music, you’re given that fresh, in-the-moment relationship. It’s so much more exciting, and the music is subject to all the same things that the dance is when it’s played live.”

A friend suggested she collaborate with Swing, who is also a fan of the live performance. In fact, Swing long shied away from compositional projects because he always wants to perform what he’s written; he has no interest in writing it down then giving it away for another musician to perform.

For Upswept, Swing paid attention to what Birdsall told her dancers—her descriptions of “luffing sails” and “wind blowing on water,” her requests for a certain quality of movement, or interpretive embodiments. Swing knew that a literal interpretation of the dancers’ movements wouldn’t be interesting to him, so he took copious notes and “subconsciously, a musical representation came to match it,” he says.

During rehearsals, the dance adjusted to the music, the music to the dance, eventually coaxing a full merge. “It’s almost like you have to look at it out of your peripheral vision, and feel that energy of the whole, and that’s where the music comes from,” Swing says. “I’ve never written music that way before.”

For all the music Swing makes, it’s hard to believe he nearly quit. “I had this wrist injury, and I realized I only knew myself as a musician and not anything else,” says Swing.

He learned to dance ballet, he started writing short stories and studied French. But once he let go of music, songs started coming in at a rate and intensity that couldn’t be ignored. Realizing he still had something to say, he returned to playing, and when he did, his wrist suddenly got better. Those songs make up the 2017 Wes Swing record And the Heart.

Swing is quick to say that his music—all of his music—comes from his subconscious, from the act of asking himself questions, sitting with his own honest answers and being open to how they manifest in the music. “It goes all places, and I’m glad that I can feel, and so that’s what I want to express” in music, says Swing.

“What I really care about is trying to make something beautiful,” Swing says. “…That tickle up the spine…that feeling is so wonderful. Being alive, that’s the real reason [I make music]. It makes me feel alive.”