Tag: Deborah McLeod

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Spring emergence

Mary Michaela Murray’s “Emancipation.”

By Sarah Sargent

According to Greek mythology, Hades, lord of the underwold, fell in love with Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Hades kidnapped Persephone and pulled her down to his subterranean kingdom, until Zeus intervened and freed her. During her time in the underworld, however, Persephone ate a handful of pomegranate seeds. Because she’d tasted the food of the dead, she was forced to return for a few months every year. During those months, Demeter became sad, leaving the earth barren and causing winter. Persephone’s annual ascent would cheer her mother up again, bringing spring.

“Persephone Ascending: A Multi-site Group Show of Virginia Women Artists” at Chroma Projects/Vault Virginia, Studio IX, and a number of storefront windows along the Downtown Mall and off Harris Street, presents different voices, viewpoints, and interpretations of the myth. (A full list of artists in the show can be found at chromaprojects.com.)

“When I started planning this, the Downtown Mall was full of empty storefronts,” says Chroma Projects Director Deborah McLeod. “Walking along and seeing all that sadness and dearth, it just pulled you down.” Expanding the exhibition into those vacant places seemed like the perfect antidote, but managers of the unleased spaces were hesitant to display work that might turn off potential lessors. So McLeod turned to businesses to display the work. These include Water Street Studios (Renee Balfour), C-VILLE Weekly (Bolanle Adeboye), Silverchair (Barbara MacCallum), 2nd Act Books (Rose Guterbock), My Dance Shoppe (Megan Hillary), Uplift Thrift (Nina Burke), and Rethreads (Dawn Hansen and Ann Ray).

Naturally, pomegranates figure largely in the show. Susanne Arnold uses an actual one to form her figure’s body in “Persephone Rising.” Linda Wachtmeister’s halved pomegranate (“Consequential”) references Persephone’s bifurcated existence. A reduced palette of hot pinks and grays and a graphic style make the images pop. Undulating lines dotted with white seed-like shapes pulse away from the pomegranate, suggesting the ripple effect of Persephone’s consumption.

Alexandria Searls’ stunning photo collage, “The Face of Persephone,” has an appealing hard-candy lusciousness. The composition depicts a dangling plastic baggie containing two pomegranates. As if emanating from it, a miasma of fleeting images, including Persephone’s face, hovers above. The blurry collage contrasts elegantly with the crystalline quality of the shiny, red pomegranates sheathed in translucent plastic. 

How do you point out the entrenched racism and subjugation of women that exists within the world of classical ballet? With adorable little ballerina apples dancing across a stage. Megan Hillary’s “Of Pomegranates and Freshly Peeled Apples” alludes to a George Balanchine quote that describes how a dancer’s skin should be as pale as the flesh of an unskinned apple, i.e. never exposed to sun. While excluding dancers of color altogether, the quote also sets up parallels between Balanchine’s sun-deprived dancers and Persephone, who is also kept away from the sun by a powerful, controlling male. Hillary likens the rising of Persephone to the strides that have been made in ballet, as evidenced by toe shoes on the periphery of the piece that hail the (shockingly recent) introduction of different skin tone-hued ballet slippers. 

Chuxin Zhang’s poignant “Emergence” uses a found piece of driftwood with silver and white clay to depict Persephone’s/spring’s return. The snow that has encased the figure is melting and breaking apart, leaving little drifts that trail behind her. You can see wings tightly folded at her side as within a chrysalis—a suggestion that she will soon fly away and soar.

Other works less literally tied to Persephone’s story include the breaking laces of the corset, which represent the casting off of the trammels of female confinement, in Michelle Gagliano and Beatrix Ost’s “The Persimmon Burst.” Rosamond Casey’s “The Something Else that Had Been Lurking All Along Beneath the Thing that Was” exudes a distinct malevolence that dovetails with our idea of the underworld. There’s a decidedly corporal quality to the rent and moist looking “ductwork” that runs up through the center of the piece. One thinks of an esophageal tunnel, a discarded chrysalis, the interior of a stem, or perhaps Persephone’s route back from Hades ripped open by her flight.

Polly Breckenridge and Allyson Mellberg-Taylor attack the prompt through the aesthetic of vintage commercial art. It is quiet, but it packs a punch. Breckenridge’s “Qui Tacet Consentire Videtur” (they who are silent, appear to consent) pairs drawings of girls in different poses, possibly taken from some kind of manual on the human figure or pattern book, together with a variety of the patronizing things men (mostly) say to women and girls. Breckenridge uses glitter, a childish pencil scrawl, and smudged erasures to drive home the point that this indoctrination starts early.

Mellberg-Taylor’s message may be more oblique, but we see in the contemptuous gaze of the woman in “The Radish Cycle” someone who’s not going to take any shit from anybody despite what you might think of her overabundant collar of leaves. Mellberg-Taylor’s women seem to maintain their equanimity (and power) in spite of the strange circumstances they find themselves in. 

Persephone ascending back into the world is a celebration of the return of spring. It takes on enhanced significance this year as we emerge from the winter of COVID-19 into a vernal season full of promise, thanks to vaccines. And of course, as these artists have shown us, Persephone is a potent allegory of female empowerment whose relevance continues today.

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Arts Culture

The resilience will not be televised: Three artists dig into the psyche for Chroma’s winter solstice show

Leigh Anne Chambers, Aggie Zed, and Michelle Gagliano share a disorientation in their work that pushes the viewer to interpret the artists' narratives

Chroma Projects Director Deborah McLeod has been keeping a unique holiday tradition for the past several years. “Every year at Christmastime, I showcase Aggie Zed’s oddly enchanting work,” says McLeod. “I think of it as a modern version of the sort of folkloric forms and superstitious practices surrounding not just Christmas, but Krampus, Samhain, and other costumed celebrations of the winter solstice—mostly focused on the breaking of barriers between the physical and spirit worlds.”

This year McLeod chose artists Leigh Anne Chambers and Michelle Gagliano to accompany Zed’s work in “What to Wondering Eyes Should Appear” at Chroma Projects though December 19.

“In Leigh Anne Chambers’ paintings, I imagine that mysterious, unfathomable drama that traditionally goes on in our collective heads in the dark,” says McLeod. “There’s a kind of disorientation and lack of personal control that happens. …A similar disorientation occurs in Michelle Gagliano’s work. Her paintings urge us to pass through those familiar gateways to something more enigmatic that lies beyond the material world.”

Chambers has made a practice of incorporating non-traditional art media, such as vinyl floor covering and carpeting, to call into question our ideas about art. In these works, she uses liquid rubber, a sealant for roofs and retaining walls. The material creates impenetrable expanses of pure blackness that obscure anything behind them. These bold planes have pronounced bravado and engender a lively spatial and textural interplay with Chambers’ other passages.

A work of remarkable power, Chambers’ “Combative Acquaintance” hums with charged energy. Girly pinks explode across the upper right of the painting, cascading down in a dramatic diagonal. These almost-too-pretty hues are tempered by brushwork that introduces brown, green, yellow, and purple. Blocks of black, acid green, and maroon near the bottom add flatness, which contrasts to Chambers’ ornate painterliness. These also provide the semblance of background and ground on which a mass of huddled figures seems to crouch. But Chambers is playing with our perceptions; on further inspection, we can’t be sure they are figures at all. She allows us to get only so far in deciphering, before she drops the illusion altogether.

Gagliano takes a poetic approach to rendering the landscape, focusing on the ephemeral and emotional qualities, and producing work that is atmospheric, symbolic, and mysterious. Recently, she has embraced a more abstract approach, based on the palette of Renaissance painter Raphael, with ultramarine blues, vivid reds, and a liberal use of gold.

“Raffaello in Blue” suggests a landscape with an implied horizon line. Above is the lighter cerulean blue of sky, draped with peculiar, almost dripping clouds, and below, the darker blue and dun color of sun-dappled topography. There is something undeniably elemental about the piece, as if Gagliano is drilling down to the very essence of things: the vapors within the air and the lapis lazuli from which ultramarine pigment is derived in the earth.

In 2018, Gagliano eliminated all toxic materials from her work, introducing ground pigments, oils, and solvents. “I went from the old techniques of layer upon layer of glaze applied with brush, sponge, and knife, to working pigments directly into the surface, using the same kinds of mediums as Raphael used, lavender and walnut oil,” she says. “They’re nontoxic and not harmful to the environment. Now, my studio smells like a spa and you could make a salad dressing from my binding medium!”

There’s a scavenged quality about Aggie Zed’s work. Growing up on Sullivan’s Island (outside Charleston, South Carolina), which was then a sleepy community, Zed and her siblings had the run of the place with its abandoned fort and beaches. Her father was an engineer for a TV station and an all-around tinkerer. After his untimely death in a car crash, money was tight. Zed had to rely on her imagination and skill at scavenging and upcycling to entertain herself. These influences inform her aesthetic, which has the same ocean-tossed, sun-bleached, and windswept quality as the detritus you might find on a beach.

Zed produces a variety of small-scale sculptures, including ceramic human figures and human-animal combos—copper wire, ceramic, and metal assemblages she calls “scrap floats.” These threadbare but jaunty little constructions are curious and endearing. They recall the inventiveness and charm of Alexander Calder’s “Circus.” Take for instance, “Tinyman Tale,” which features a ceramic figure on a joyfully jury-rigged contraption shored up by scraps of metal and what looks like a cog standing in for a wheel. A sail, or banner, billows over the rear of the float. It’s a miniature double-sided painting that suggests the ongoing phases of a narrative. Despite its size, the little painting packs a real punch with interesting juxtapositions of shapes and bold colors.

Zed deftly navigates the fine line between charming and cutesy, creating figures that have far more in common with those of Hieronymus Bosch than the ones that populate the “Wonderful World of Disney.”

“I love my figures because they look like they’ve put up with a lot,” she says. “They’re so patient and poignant, despite whatever it is they have to deal with. I actually think most people are like that. It’s just that the television doesn’t show it.”

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Arts

Matters of the art: Going behind the scenes of local galleries and museums

Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, takes a look at one of the museums pieces.
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Arts

Artists gather their animals for Chroma exhibition

The “Manger Scene” exhibition at Chroma Projects offers a comforting art break through December 24. Courtesy the artist

There is something about the scene of animals gathered in a manger to greet a newborn that offers a bit of relief to the anxieties of our human world. “Animals are so pure of heart,” says Chroma Projects director Deborah McLeod. “They have no political agenda. And in the manger scenes, the clusters of animals are neutral. They’re gathering around innocence.”

The image of this tranquil setting compelled her to invite a number of artists who work with animals as their subject matter to show their work at Chroma Projects’ downtown location this month. The exhibition consists of paintings and sculptural installations by Virginia Van Horn, Russ Warren, Aggie Zed, Pam Black and Lester Van Winkle. Three of these artists in particular share a fascination with horses that has informed their lives and their work for years.

Virginia Van Horn’s large-scale horse sculpture, “If Wishes Were Horses,” rests on bales of hay and a metal bed and immediately draws the eye upon entering. Van Horn, an artist based in Norfolk, writes in an e-mail: “My fascination with horses dates back to my childhood as a champion rider and it continues to be the central image in my work.” Her two other pieces in the exhibition consist of wire sculptural interpretations of the equine form, including one with two heads, each nestled in a black box that resembles a stable. “The juxtaposition of animals with man-made artifacts,” she writes, “emphasizes their shared traits with humanity, as if we all live in a shared fairy tale.”

Warren, from Charlottesville, raised horses for 30 years and is well-acquainted with their form and personality. He was most recently inspired by an exhibition of Picasso’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art. When he returned, he began sculpting the horse and crane that appear in “Manger Scene.”

His works consist of wood covered in chicken wire, which he then overlays and shapes with plaster. He often combines found objects with his sculptures that also reflect his agricultural environment, such as the pitchfork that represents the horse’s tail. His color selections, says Warren, “are influenced a lot by Mexican muralists, specifically Tamayo and Picasso’s Cubist phase.” At the foot of his two sculptures, reclining on a makeshift manger, is a two-dimensional dog named “Un chien” (French for “The dog”), whose material base is cement Warren made from his farm’s gravel dust.

Zed’s anthropomorphic figures are what she calls “intimate-scaled,” and are sculpted by hand. Her origins as a sculptor began with a small act of rebellion in college. After being criticized for painting horses, she built a chess set by hand in order to have an excuse to make horses (in the form of the knight pieces). Little did she know she would stumble on the livelihood that would allow her to paint.

As she branched into sculpting, Zed worked with ceramic at first. But soon the problem of chipped ears and broken legs presented itself when she began shipping. Her solution? To integrate metal components into her work. She calls these fantastical pieces “scrap floats,” as she imagines them “as parade floats at a time in the future when technology has gone off the limb and we’re left with various parts we don’t use anymore.”

One such piece is a mechanical rabbit with wings. Another is a horse with metal ears and wheels for hooves. “Almost all my work,” she says, “rather than meaning something, is a visual exploration. I get it to a point where it doesn’t look mechanically awkward and it has an emotive quality.”

While the manger scene tells the story of animals gathering around a newborn human, Chroma offers the opportunity for humans to gather around these representations of animals and consider their interior lives, their sentience or what we might even call their humanity.