Tag: gallery
When you imagine a mother, what do you picture?
A woman up to her elbows in soapy dishwasher with a baby strapped to her chest or a toddler clinging to her ankle? A woman who wheels and deals like a boss until she sprints off to daycare? Or do you think of your own mother? The mothers you know? Our universal longing for mother-love?
“It’s different for everybody,” says Ashley Florence, the curator of the group show “Mother Mother” at Studio IX. “We can’t limit ourselves into thinking that the idea of ‘mother’ says dirty dishes and screaming child. Because it’s just so much bigger than that.”
As a Charlottesville-based photographer, Florence sees the theme come up often in her work. “Not necessarily just motherhood, but my mother, and being mothered, and what is transmitted through that relationship. It’s something all of us, men and women alike, have experienced.”
But the subject, she says, feels fairly taboo in the art world. Unless it’s rendered in a smart enough way, “the basic experience of motherhood, or the mother in its everyday-ness,” she says, tends to get ignored.
The oversight prompted Florence to conceive a group show featuring female artists in her network, and so “Mother Mother” was born.
Fourteen women explore the idea of mother across a range of mediums, from sculpture, painting and illustration to photography, video, performance and collage. Contributors include Lenka Clayton, Sarah Boyts Yoder, elin o’Hara slavick, Jina Valentine, Tracy Spencer Stonestreet, Laura Dillon Rogers, Lisa Ryan, Allyson Mellberg Taylor, Meredith McKown, Ashley Florence, Sage Latane Hastert, Amanda Monroe Finn, Holly Bass and Jamila Felton.
“These artists have really approached it in so many intelligent and sensitive ways. There’s this tenderness, and connection, and humanity, but there’s also tenacity, and split personality, and there’s violence when it goes wrong,” Florence says. “The commonality really is the polarity and the vastness, because it’s not an identifiable, nameable, easy-to-talk-about-able subject.”
The experience of motherhood ranges as widely as the show’s themes.
Nervous limitation is the center of Clayton’s video project, which follows her in different environments. She lets her son walk away from her until she gets nervous, then runs after him and literally measures the distance she can be from him.
In “The Split,” Boyts Yoder explores the everyday duality of being a mother. “You have the person that you were before you had kids. That person doesn’t go away,” Florence says. “Then you have the person that you are with your kids. You’re split between personalities, split between feelings and split between pure joy and pure terror at the same time.”
In a different video, queer mother Spencer Stonestreet demonstrates the burden of being expected to be a traditional Southern woman. Her work features a mother dragging furniture and housewares for three miles through a southern landscape.
“There’s heaviness that is present in some of the work, but there’s also lightness,” Florence says. “It comes around the whole idea of mother, that there’s this weight we bear, and there’s the lightness of being.”
A mother herself, the curator of the show identifies with many of the feelings expressed by the artists. “Once you become a mother, you realize that a lot of your fears and a lot of your hopes are exactly the same as everybody else’s. You’re really having a lot of the same feelings as the next person.”
However, her contribution to “Mother Mother” doesn’t focus on her own motherhood. Instead, she’s showing work about her mother: two chromogenic prints with etched glass, each with a piece of writing on it. The first reads: “I told mommy I’m going to have a black baby when I grow up.” On the second: “She said just wait for your grandfather to die.”
“For me, that piece is about my innocence being interrupted by racism and racist thought,” Florence says. “How language is part of that, and how we transmit ideas into our children’s minds through our mouths and our language.”
Dillon Rogers also hints at the subtle influence of mothers with a series of photographs that overlay images of herself and her children. The subjects are nude, though “you can’t really see much of anything except the form,” Florence says.
“In one image, [Rogers’] body is totally in focus and very present. In the other one, she’s like a mist. And it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s totally it. When you think of the growing relationship you had with your mother, she was a person, but she also wasn’t.
“Because mothers are human, but they’re also not human. They’re something more than that.”
It’s a bit chilly in the air-conditioned exhibition room at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, but the temperature isn’t what’s giving Rebecca Schoenthal goosebumps. It’s the art.
Specifically, it’s William Baziotes’ cool-toned, blue-hued “Night Form” and Adolph Gottlieb’s earth-toned pictograph, “The Sorceress,” hanging on a Fralin gallery wall, together for the first time since 1947. “Individually, they’re phenomenal works,” says Schoenthal, a mid-century American art expert and curator of exhibitions at The Fralin, explaining that Gottlieb’s pictograph series in particular was crucial to the advent of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which put American art on the map in the 20th century.
Together, the two works open a portal to the past, to September 1947, when UVA alumnus and lawyer-turned-crime-novelist-turned-art-critic-turned-art-dealer Samuel Kootz mounted an exhibition titled “Women” at his eponymous art gallery. “Women” was revolutionary in many ways, from the show’s subject matter to its catalog, for which Kootz enlisted writers like William Carlos Williams and Charles Baudelaire to respond to the paintings on view.
Much of what Kootz did throughout his career was revolutionary, and “Dealer’s Choice: The Samuel Kootz Gallery 1945-1966,” the exhibition currently on view at The Fralin through December 17, aims to shake up the art historical narrative by showing how art dealers—not just artists and critics—influence the art world.
“Dealer’s Choice” is largely based on a set of paintings that Kootz gave to The Fralin in the mid-1970s. Schoenthal’s curatorial challenge was figuring out how to present the scope of Kootz’s life’s work as an art dealer and writer in The Fralin’s space, via a narrative that viewers could absorb.
She decided to show only artists that Kootz himself exhibited and represented, like Pablo Picasso (yes, the Picasso), Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman and others (though there are a couple of exceptions to that rule), and to show only pieces that can be traced back directly to Kootz’s own hands, from the first painting he ever sold (Stuart Davis’ “Barber Shop,” bought by Roy Neuberger in 1942) to the Baziotes and Gottliebs that hung in Kootz’s gallery and eventually ended up in world-class museums. “Every picture that is in those rooms, I can tell you exactly when and why [Kootz] had it,” Schoenthal says.
After World War II destroyed many European cultural centers, American artists were poised to fill the void left in the art world, and Kootz enabled them to do so both intellectually and financially. He encouraged artists to explore and challenge abstraction and expressionism in the vein of the pre-war European De Stijl and Surrealist movements, respectively, and offered the artists signed to his gallery a monthly stipend in exchange for a certain number of pieces.
This gave Kootz Gallery artists like Gottlieb, Baziotes, Motherwell and others the chance to explore psychic automatism—an expression of an unfettered thought through painting or drawing—as a mode of creation that could lead to the exploration of new forms. These artists, along with like-minded artists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, cultivated the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Dealers like Kootz are often left out of the art historical narrative, Schoenthal says, and Kootz had a long career that hasn’t been very well-studied. She hopes “Dealer’s Choice” will prompt scholars to study not just Kootz, but the dealer-artist relationship, says Schoenthal. “I want future scholars to see this and come up with all the millions of exhibitions that could spin off…to run with all the work that can be done, because it’s so rich.”
A dealer can “sometimes give collectors this nudge, and the collector becomes so important that it has this whole aftereffect,” Schoenthal says.
Take, for example, the painting that started it all: Davis’ “Barber Shop.” Neuberger, a stockbroker and art collector with bold taste, bought it from Kootz in 1942 for $250. Neuberger liked the piece and bought another piece from Kootz, then another and another, eventually amassing one of the largest, most significant modern American art collections —with Kootz’s help. Neuberger later left his collection to the State University of New York at Purchase to establish the Neuberger Museum of Art, the 10th-largest university art museum in the United States. Visitors to the museum—artists, art history students and scholars—find inspiration in the art, which then shows up in their own paintings or scholarly papers. The Kootz effect is tangible.
“I know we’ve had some pretty amazing things in the past,” Schoenthal says of The Fralin’s exhibitions, but not since the museum exhibited Bartolo di Fredi’s “The Adoration of the Magi,” a 14th-century Sienese altarpiece, in 2012 has Schoenthal been truly in awe of an exhibition. World-class institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art lent “really significant” works to The Fralin for this show, Schoenthal says, and Kootz’s wife even loaned some from her own collection.
“I am still dumbfounded that these paintings are here,” Schoenthal says, slowly shaking her head and looking at the Gottlieb and Baziotes with wide eyes, as though the paintings will disappear if she blinks. “It blows my mind.”
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First Fridays: November 3
First Fridays: November 3
Ann Robertson made her first art quilt more than 20 years ago, as a way of working through her experience in the Great Hanshin earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan, in the wee hours of January 17, 1995.
With no prior quilting experience and only one American quilting book and some Japanese quilting magazines to go by, Robertson developed her own style outside of traditional medallion-style quilts, making wall quilts with silk from old kimonos, and calling attention to the fabric’s woven and painted designs.
For “Sticks and Stones,” one of the pieces on view this month at the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective show at Indoor Biotechnologies, Robertson created a bold, geometric design from 25 squares of red silk, each square randomly slashed with an inserted strip of contrasting silk (the “sticks”). The focal point of the piece, the three “stones,” is in the upper left quadrant, and the density of the “sticks” diminishes as the eye roves toward the outer edges of the quilt, the surface of which is free-stitched with various colored threads and patterns. Like most quilts, this one is sewn together, batted and backed.
Quilting isn’t unlike painting or drawing, Robertson says. Free-stitching creates patterns revealed by light and shadow;
use of different thread can slightly alter perception of the fabric color, and translucent fabrics add shading and dimension. “Sticks and Stones” speaks to the fiber and stitch nature of the quilted art piece, she says, artful but familiar in its appeal to both the eye and the hand.—Erin O’Hare
Gallery exhibits
Annie Gould Gallery 121 B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of work by Jane Angelhart, Jenifer Ansardi, Fax Ayres, Hallie Farley, Alex Gould, Jennifer Paxton and Peter Willard.
Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Verdant Melody,” a show of paintings inspired by artist Nancy Campa’s surroundings. November 11, 4-6pm.
FF The Bridge PAI 2019 Monticello Rd. “People of Charlottesville,” an exhibit of Aaron Farrington’s portraits of Charlottesville residents, created through a 19th-century wet plate collodion process. 5:30-9pm.
FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “Color Camp,” featuring perspectives on the interactions of color and form by Ken Horne and Cate West Zahl. 5-8pm.
FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. “Birdscapes,” a photography exhibit that gets up close and intimate with birds. 5:30-7:30pm.
FF Create Gallery at Indoor Biotechnologies 700 Harris St. An exhibition of work by the Fiber and Stitch Art Collective, which uses fiber and thread in a variety of ways to create two- and three-dimensional works. 5-7pm.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “My Favorite Time of Year,” featuring autumn landscape photography by Ben Greenberg. November 11, 2pm.
FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Celebrate C’ville: 20 Years of Virginia Art,” featuring work in a variety of media by the gallery’s entire membership of artists to honor the gallery’s 20th anniversary. 6-8pm.
FF Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “Gratitude Art,” featuring water colors, acrylic mixed media and oils paintings of landscapes, florals, still life and architecture by Cheryl Fee. 5-7pm.
The Fralin Museum of Art 155 Rugby Rd. “Dealer’s Choice: The Samuel Kootz Gallery 1945-1966,” an exhibition that examines the critical role Kootz played in establishing modern American art as an international force; “Oriforme” by Jean Arp; and in the Joanne B. Robinson Object Study Gallery, a set of objects including Chinese bronzes, ceramics and sculpture, ancient Mediterranean coins, African masks and figures and more.
The Gallery at Ebb & Flow 71 River Rd., Faber. “En Plein Air,” an exhibition of plein air landscape paintings by V-Anne Evans. November 11, 2-5pm.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Karma,” featuring work by Lisa Beane that addresses privileged racism.
FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Land Patterns,” paintings by Susan McAlister inspired by a love of the land and an admiration for abstract painter Cy Twombly. Through November 12.
FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Pipe Works and Other Ramblings,” an exhibit of Frederic A. Crist’s sculpture. In the Lower Hall North Gallery, an exhibition of work by Etta Harmon Levin and Charlene Cross. In the Lower Hall South Gallery, cut paper and digital collage works by Charles Peale. In the Upper Hall Galleries North and South, “Off the Wall,” an exhibition of work by the UVA Sculpture Community. 5:30-7:30pm.
FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of watercolor paintings by the Studio E. artists, under the direction of Eloise Gardiner Giles. 5-7pm.
FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “My Body is a Grave,” a selection of large-scale paintings and works on paper by Paul Brainard that explores themes of mortality, virtual reality and consumer culture; “Solve et Coagula,” an exhibit debuting the abstract expressionist-style work of Peter Benedetti; and “Dante’s Inferno,” a mixed media exhibition by Michelle Gagliano. 5:30-7:30pm.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibition of work by acrylic artist Nicholas Martori. November 4, 4-8pm.
FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “A Study of Morocco,” photography by Alexandra Borden. 6-8pm.
FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Bonjour from ___! I hope this card finds you well…” an exhibition of photo-postcards sent by Annie Dunckel. 5-7pm.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Understanding and Healing,” featuring paintings by GerriAnne Huey. November 5, 12:30pm.
FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Some Landscape Diversions,” a series of Mary Atkinson’s recent landscape paintings that looks at the landscape as respite. 5:30-7:30pm.
FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Sound & Color,” acrylic paintings on canvas by Brittany Fan. 5-7:30pm.
FF The Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. A group multimedia exhibit featuring work from Terry Coffey, Julia Kindred and Carol Kirkham Martin of the BozART Fine Art Collective. 1-4pm.
FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.
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First Fridays: October 6
When Georgia Webb draws, she tends to draw things that are close to her—her mother, Ali, her grandpa Jim or her friend Sidney. She draws her favorite cartoon characters, iconic items like Spam cans, and often reinterprets famous paintings, such as Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” in her own distinct black line-and-marker style.
A selection of Webb’s drawings is on view in the Upper Hall Gallery of the McGuffey Art Center this month, as part of an exhibition of work by artists from Innisfree Village, a local lifesharing community for adults with intellectual disabilities, or as McGuffey resident artist and show curator Christopher Headings prefers to say, a group of “friends who make great art.”
The show also includes sculptural stuffed animals made by Innisfree artists, and a series of trains in the snow drawn by artist Willy G. using pencil, colored pencil, pen and deliberate dots of white acrylic paint. Willy, who has been making art for a while and is a frequent visitor to First Fridays openings all over town, used to create the maquettes for Daggett Grigg Architects.
The mission of the McGuffey Arts Association is to support artists dedicated to practicing their art and to passing on the creative spirit, Headings says, and this show is well within that mission. Plus, he adds, “my goal is for people to not have a preconceived notion of [these artists], and to see this work for what it is—it’s art.”
Here’s what’s on view at galleries around town for the month of October.
Annie Gould Gallery 121 S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of work from more than a dozen regional and out-of-state artists.
Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Blue Ridge and Beyond,” a show of work from six plein air painters. October 14, 6pm.
FF The Bridge PAI 2019 Monticello Rd. “Parlor of Horrors,” Matthew Gatto’s tribute to the golden age of Hollywood horror films. 5pm.
FF Central Library 201 E. Market St. “World Art Exhibit,” featuring work by refugees resettled in Charlottesville. 5-7pm.
FF Chroma Projects 418 E. Main St. “Purity,” somewhat autobiographical, complementary and contrasting color-field paintings by Jim Henry. 6-8pm.
FF City Clay 700 Harris St., Ste. 104 City Clay members show and celebration of the new studio space. 5:30-7pm.
FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. “Made In Charlottesville,” a photo exhibit celebrating businesses making products locally. 5:30-7:30pm.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “It’s the Little Things,” featuring Kathleen Mistry’s jewelry work inspired by memories of nature’s fleeting moments. October 14, 3pm.
FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Nouveau Willow,” featuring Lynn Windsor’s stained glass meditations on life cycles. 6-8pm.
C’ville Coffee 1301 Harris St. “Everything Acrylic,” a collection of impasto palette knife paintings by Caroll Mallin.
FF The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition featuring work by sculptor and film artist Sandy Williams IV. 5-7pm.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Karma,” featuring work by Lisa Beane. October 14, 6pm.
FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Land Patterns,” paintings by Susan Mcalister inspired by a love of the land and an admiration for abstract painter Cy Twombly. 1-5pm. Opening reception Oct. 5, 5-7pm.
FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Les Desmoiselles,” an exhibit of Bob Anderson’s large-scale drawings. In the Lower Hall Galleries North and South, “All Rise: The Artist’s Voice in Contemporary Activism,” a group show exploring the role of the artist in intersectional activism. In the Upper Hall Galleries North and South, “Innisfree Village,” work by artists from a lifesharing community for adults with disabilities. 5:30-7:30pm.
Neal Guma Fine Art 105 Third St. NE. An exhibition featuring Elger Esser, Chris McCaw, Sally Mann and William Wylie.
Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Fall Favorites,” a multimedia group art exhibit featuring the work of Kelly Oakes, Richard Bednar and Carol Kirkham Martin of the BozART Fine Art Collective.
Piedmont Virginia Community College V. Earl Dickinson Building 501 College Dr. In the North Gallery, “Fish Out of Water,” paintings by Lisa Parker Hyatt. In the South Gallery, “Metadata,” a mixed-media exhibition by Laura Parsons, L. Staiger, Mara Sprafkin and James Yates.
Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. “Waterscapes,” featuring watermedia paintings by Matalie Deane.
FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “My Body is a Grave,” a selection of large-scale paintings and works on paper by Paul Brainard that explores themes of mortality, virtual reality and consumer culture; and “Solve et Coagula,” an exhibit debuting the abstract expressionist-style work of Peter Benedetti. 5:30-7:30pm.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Germination,” a mixed- media exhibition featuring the work of Staunton’s Beverley Street Studio School.
FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “La Vie en Rose,” Parisian lifestyle photographs by Abby Grace. 6-8pm.
FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Forget Your Perfect Offering,” a mixed-media exhibit by Sarah Boyts Yoder that explores her search for a space to situate anger, frustration, hope and despair. 5-7pm.
The Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. A group multimedia exhibit featuring work from Terry Coffey, Julia Kindred and Carol Kirkham Martin of the BozART Fine Art Collective.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Water Like Memory,” featuring paintings of water by Susan Willis Brodie.
Virginia Arts of the Book Center 2125 Ivy Rd. “Passato Prossimo,” Lyall Harris’ collaborative exhibition made from objects and ephemera of nostalgia donated by more than 40 people. October 4, 4pm.
FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. An exhibit of landscape photography by Jamie Payne. 5:30-7:30pm.
FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Improbable Figures,” collage on paper works by Lisa Ryan. 5-7:30pm.
White Hall Vineyard 5282 Sugar Ridge Rd., Crozet. A show featuring the work of Randy Baskerville and Carol Kirkham Martin, artists from the BozART Fine Art Collective. Oct. 7 and 8, 11am-5pm.
FF WVTF/Radio IQ 216 W. Water St. “Subtleties of Nature,” featuring work by Nancy Jane Dodge inspired by the covert hideaways of the natural world. 5-7pm.
FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.
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Lisa Parker Hyatt’s Miami imagery hits home
Even though she lives in the nation’s capital now, Lisa Parker Hyatt can’t leave Miami behind.
“I spent most of my life in Miami,” explains the artist, whose richly colored paintings are included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the archives of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
“What I love about it is that light, that light and color. I carry the imagery of it with me: the palm trees, the flowers, the beaches, the clouds.” She pauses. “I don’t carry the mosquitoes.”
“Fish Out of Water”
Main Gallery at PVCC
Through November 8
Known as a key artist in the late 1980s resurgence of Miami art, Hyatt creates large-scale works that feature interior spaces caught in transit: shifting light, gliding clouds or birds, the implied passage of a paper airplane. Bright flowers and childhood objects, such as plastic Godzilla toys and Hello Kitty icons, sometimes make a surprise appearance.
“Often my things are very serious, but this body of work is my most humorous,” Hyatt says, referring to her latest exhibition, “Fish Out of Water,” currently on display at the PVCC Main Gallery in the V. Earl Dickinson Building.
“It was fun to do these formal pieces, these flower arrangements, with plastic toys like My Little Pony and Jesus in the water,” she says. “They’re both plastic and they’re both made up by people. I hope I’m not offending anyone.”
Even in Hyatt’s black-and-white works, Miami makes an appearance.
She references a large still life of tulips with a miniature Buddha submerged in the glass flower vase. A fake rubber alligator poses in front of this tableau, its jaws open and—in Hyatt’s opinion—complaining to the Buddha.
“Albert [the alligator] is my muse,” she says. “I love alligators. I have a real one, a stuffed one, in my studio that was from my grandparents’ grove in Florida.” Its name, too, is Albert.
The cast of characters in her work comes from the eclecticism of her own interests. “I go from very highbrow to very lowbrow. I love Fellini and I love any Godzilla films,” she says.
As a child, Hyatt also loved comics books, and to this day she keeps a book in which she sketches cartoon-like pictures of herself thinking thoughts and doing things in the world. Despite this self-reflective practice, she says it wasn’t until college that she began consciously creating art from her real-life experience.
“A long time ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of South Florida, I didn’t know what I was going to paint about. It would be like a writer who doesn’t know what she’s going to write about. I turned to a graduate student and asked, ‘How do you know what you’re going to do?’ He said, ‘The best thing I can tell you is I do what is familiar to me.’”
That’s when something clicked. She began exploring the spaces she lived in—literally. Recalling the geometric frames of comic books, she focused her attention on rooms.
“Rooms are incredibly personal,” she says. “People live in these spaces and never look at the spaces they’re in. Most [of the rooms I paint] are imaginary, though they’re based on real places, from my homes over many years.”
At first, she says, she studied the “unbelievable clarity” of Miami light as it moved through different spaces. In her paintings, she realized, “I could start using it for metaphors for different concepts. Light dashes through a room like thoughts dash through you. Light moving through frames moves you through a narrative in the work.”
In time, Hyatt found additional subjects, including her own paintings.
“I have canvases laying everywhere in my house. Bare stretchers, stretchers with linen on them ready to go,” she says. “I used my old undergraduate works as portraits. I’d lay pink and blue next to each other, and they became metaphors for people touching each other.”
The surprising evolution of her work keeps her coming back for more.
“That’s why I named the show ‘Fish Out of Water,’” she says. Though there’s a literal basis for the title, including a painting with fish flopping out of their vase and another with plastic sharks in the water, it refers more broadly to her process.
“That pivotal moment of stepping into your studio and picking up your brush is something new every time,” she says. “I get into a different zone, and just like that, I’m swimming.”
Local artist Suzanne Stryk has always been fascinated by nests.
“When I was 8, I loved to page through a Little Golden book, The Wonder Book of Birds. And then in fourth grade, my grandmother gave me Wonders in Your Own Backyard for Christmas,” writes Stryk in her artist’s statement.
“I never outgrew the ideas in those books—birds and wonder, going on nearly six decades now. I’m still awed by watching a bird construct a nest. A single feather—nothing could be more astonishing. And how do tiny coils in a bird’s DNA code its ability to navigate by the stars?”
‘Nesting Materials’
On display through May 27
Chroma Projects
A Chicago native who minored in biology and once worked as a scientific illustrator, Stryk is known for conceptual paintings that highlight the natural world. Her latest exhibit at Chroma Projects, “Nesting Materials,” focuses entirely on birds and—you guessed it—their nests.
“It’s not just birds’ nests as they are,” Stryk says. “It’s also our response to nests and birds and the natural world in general. The idea of nest building relates to our wish for security, for constructing things, for organizing and many layers of our personal experience.”
“I’m fascinated by the cross-pollination of two unrelated things. You put sheet music and birds together and it makes a new thing, a kind of dialogue between nature and culture.” Suzanne Stryk
She invites viewers to dig into their own ideas by painting, sculpting and constructing nests from unusual materials. (“Doing so makes me all the more impressed that birds can build them without hands!” she says.)
In “Nesting Materials” one nest is made entirely of sheet music. Another is composed of strands from the avian genome.
“I’m fascinated by the cross-pollination of two unrelated things,” Stryk says. “You put sheet music and birds together and it makes a new thing, a kind of dialogue between nature and culture. And that could lead your thoughts anywhere.”
While encouraging viewers to make their own meaning, she often returns to favorite symbols, like genomes.
“I started with the DNA double helix in the ’90s, when I became fascinated with genetics as the nonfiction myth of our time,” she says. “I’m told by science that there’s an invisible genetic code behind the way birds look and behave, and the way I look and behave. You can kind of get genetics as coding the way something looks, but behavior like nest building and migration, it’s astonishing.”
Speaking of impulses, Stryk says she’s noticed a pattern among people who view her work: Nearly everyone is attracted to vortexes.
“A vortex is a kind of a spiral, and a nest is a kind of vortex. Many people can’t explain why they’re so attracted to them, but I have a hunch,” she says.
“As a shape, the vortex has a lot of movement, a lot of variety, and the sense that it’s going around like a cyclone. And yet it’s centered in a stable form. I think that that’s what we strive for in life: lively movement, and yet we want to be centered and stable.”
That’s also where the exploration of nests has led Stryk as an artist. Her thematically consistent body of work opens the door to reveal the mysteries inherent in what we think we know.
“I want to reveal the mysteries that are,” she says. “Because no matter how far we go scientifically, there are always unanswerable things out there. Science explains so much, but it doesn’t explain the why.”
Nor can science explain concepts like beauty and our need to connect with something deep and much bigger than us.
“Art is all the more important when it illuminates science and the natural world for us,” Stryk says. “Because so many of us are left cold by data. I mean, it’s very interesting, it’s very important. I can look at a genetic sequence and say, ‘Oh my God, this shows that life is all made up of the same things, like the Taoists said 2,000 years ago,’ but you know. Most people need a story to garner metaphorical meaning from things.”
That’s how a painting of a nest becomes a tool not just for exploration but activism and preservation of the things that matter most.
“Art gives us a story,” Stryk says. “When art connects to scientific data, when art connects to nature, we respond to it personally. And if we respond to it personally, it becomes much more important to us.”
Maybe it’s a cheap conceit for a writer, but there are times when it’s necessary to state the obvious: One of art’s prime functions is to take you somewhere else.
In a riveting moment of contemplation, art conveys you to a deeper plane of thought, motivates you to cultivate an unexpected appreciation of the previously mundane and, in the best cases, inspires your own flight. This is how the works of Alonzo Davis and Stacey Evans succeed as noble platforms for intimate, introspective transport.
Alonzo Davis and Stacey Evans
Second Street Gallery
Through April 28
Featured in Second Street Gallery’s latest exhibition, both artists examine our innate desire to explore, and incorporate travel as a unifying theme of their distinct approaches. Davis’ mixed media pieces traverse eras as they recall the imposing challenge of crossing oceans, while Evans’ layered photographs transform landscapes ever-changed by humanity, documenting ephemeral views only glimpsed from behind the windows of a passenger train. Both artists share observations specific enough to call personal, yet still so vastly hatched that they support an inclusive array of divergent interpretations.
Consider the fused bamboo, encaustics and vibrant LED of “Navigation Series.” Alighting the walls of Second Street’s larger space, Davis’ works merge the elemental with the technological in his take on Micronesian navigation stick charts. Originally frameworks representing Marshall Islands waterways, the charts were traditionally the tools of individuals who would likely be the sole interpreters of their own skillful configurations; in Davis’ hands, the viewers must define the potential connotations. As captains of our own voyages, the natural and electrical maps tease at direction, hint at religious symbolism and glow with the gravity involved in choosing which way to go next.
Davis offers imprecise guidance about the hazy meanings of his designs, saying the arrangements function as “a reminder of how we navigate through the changes being brought about in 2017.” In our newfound contentious age, his point becomes clearer in the boat shapes of “From Here to There” and “Made of Immigrants.” Crafted in a similar bamboo-LED style, the titles contextualize the pieces in shallow political waters, underscoring the significance of seeking out new lands.
The “Navigation Series” also incorporates collage paintings ornamented by bamboo and animal bone-carved hand shapes; the overlapping textures of the “Reach Out Series” unify Davis’ influences from his trips through West Africa, Brazil, Haiti and the American Southwest. Proffering a distillation of travel-influenced folk art touches refracted through the lens of his Alabama upbringing, 30 years living in Los Angeles and five in Maryland, Davis invites our self-directed excursions into his abstractions.
Like Davis, travel motivates the creations of locally based photographer Evans. Capturing images of the passing terrain from trains, she’s collected an extensive stock of engaging pictures from which to choose for her fascinating technique: Photos are edited, cut into contours suggested by the subjects and overlaid to produce fresh, impossible landscapes of profound depths and ominous heights. Second Street’s Dové Gallery houses “Ways of Seeing,” Evans’ series of 2’x2′ or 3’x2′ archival pigment-enlarged prints and a smattering of hand-sized original cut photo works aptly measured in inches.
From the bright circular chads ornamenting “Miniature Constructs #1-4” to the ocean wave-like swaths of stacked skies in “Interdependence,” the works give us views of rare, absurd geology and the undiscovered fissures of overcrowded cities. And though the show’s title alludes to the subjectivity of vision, Evans’ evocative photographic collages provide the kind of worthwhile experience that no time spent following her train treks could ever replicate; these are her novel perceptions. This manifold confluence of perspectives grows an extraordinary reinvention of our world, illuminating transient vistas without any intrusion of the fantastic or aid of the computer generated. Incredibly, the banal subject matter of the images awe with the kind of surprise we tend to reserve for the blurry products of extrasolar satellites and confusing subatomic realms of multimillion-dollar electron microscopes.
“Rubble in America” piles trash upon more trash, “American Dumpster” drops a crowded trailer lot over a desert scene, and “Artifacts Left Behind” deploys a tiered automotive graveyard amassed beneath a raised freeway overpass; all three deftly reflect Evans’ railway vantages, the umbral portions of our national corridors and the unpleasant byproducts of our wanderlust, hardly requiring commentary beyond photo and title.
Zooming in for the “Shift in Perspective” pieces, the close-up works downplay or obscure the original subjects altogether by emphasizing the shapes of her cut photos. The resulting compositions improvise with forms and colors in an exploration of unfamiliar surfaces and kaleidoscopic atmospheres whipped up right in her studio.
Equipped with precious trophies snatched from her expeditions, Evans says that she usually starts her collage photo pieces “with a Pandora station and a pair of scissors.” Simple. But that’s all she needs to take us over the next horizon.
According to Neal Guma, what unites the four photographers in his current show is an approach to photography that is painterly. While Ljubodrag Andric and Robert Polidori often seek out subjects that can look like paintings and play with our perception of them, Markus Brunetti and John Chiara use photography as a painter might paint, manipulating the medium to create effects.
Andric’s photograph “China #8” features a wall of gorgeous, subtly modulated hues. Here washes of mauve, blue and rust are punctuated with touches of scarlet and white. The work is reminiscent of a Color Field painting, where the focus is on the expressive and visual qualities of paint on a flat surface. One of its major proponents, Jules Olitski famously said his work should ideally look like “nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying there.”
Andric’s is in some ways a disorienting image. At first, one isn’t sure if it’s a painting or a photograph, or whether it’s flat or has depth. As one approaches, details such as the metal bar that bisects the image, and the areas where the paint has flaked off, emerge. “This painterly and hyper-realism works in reverse in painting,” says Guma. “For instance, when you think of a painter like Velázquez, when you’re far away, his paintings are incredibly real, but when you get up to them they fall apart and you see the individual strokes, the architecture, if you will, which from a distance coalesces to form something of a trompe l’oeil likeness. In this photograph, and also in the Brunetti, the opposite is true. The hyper-reality becomes more intense the closer you get.”
Like Andric, Polidori’s “Hotel Petra No. 7” is an image of decrepitude elevated to the realm of the sublime. “Polidori has found a way to do something very similar to Andric.”
Polidori’s aim is to capture in a photograph of rooms with many coats of different colored flaking paint the quality of a painting. “Hotel Petra” has the balance and integrity of a fully realized abstract painting with color, composition and gesture striking just the right note.
He also wants to capture the history of the place and its decay over the years. The once elegant Hotel Petra is a surrogate for the vibrant and cosmopolitan pre-civil war Beirut. This union of present and past within one image is very much a Polidori hallmark. It’s no surprise he is drawn to places like Havana, Chernobyl and post-Katrina New Orleans—storied places where the images are charged with history, catastrophe or both.
The Andric and Polidori photographs are of man-made subjects, yet Polidori’s stalactite shreds of paint and Andric’s mineral-like wall have the timbre and beauty of natural phenomena.
Brunetti appeared on the art scene to immediate acclaim in 2015 with his series of Western European sacred structures made over the course of 10 years. Brunetti photographed each building in multiple sections, which his partner, Betty Schoener, subsequently assembled to form a composite image. The enormity of the endeavor is clear when you consider that the photographs are composed of thousands of individual frames that all have to be taken under the same conditions of light so that when merged together to create the final image it appears seamless. This laborious process ensures an equal field of focus across the entire surface, giving these photographs extraordinary clarity. Looking at them, it’s as if we’re seeing these iconic buildings for the very first time and we get a sense of the shock and awe they would inspire when initially constructed.
There’s a curious play between the flatness and the detail and, as Guma says, “Brunetti renders these almost as architectural drawings. It’s just the facade. You get some of the nearby buildings, but the town is mostly gone.” In “Amiens, Cathédrale Notre-Dame,” one can enjoy both the remarkable visual effect Brunetti achieves and also appreciate these extraordinary structures and the way they would dominate a town.
Chiara takes on the Flatiron Building as his subject in “West 23rd Street at Broadway, Variation 3,” and tells us something new about the building and photography itself. Taken with a 30″x50″ pinhole camera mounted on the back of a Ford F150 pickup, Chiara shoots directly onto color photographic paper that records in negative, with the shadows and light inverted.
Guma’s version is one of three variations, the lightest and most colorful with its highly keyed yellow and touches of emerald and red. Nevertheless, there’s something rather ghostly about the photograph having to do with the yellow that seems to shroud the image in a weird sulfurous light, and the isolation that recalls Edward Hopper.
The dramatic angle makes the building resemble the prow of a ship, accentuating the forward thrust, and that the early 20th-century building’s distinctive shape was meant to convey movement, speed, modernity.
“Chiara wants to have the process part of the image, the flash of over exposure at the bottom, the curious black and red gestural shapes in the background, the tape marks he leaves behind, the uneven way he cuts the image out. This is a very painterly concept,” says Guma.
The four artists on view have distinct approaches and styles. Each produces works that are visually satisfying enough to appeal without any further knowledge, but the artists’ working process and attitude toward their oeuvres adds a whole other level of appreciation that enhances the viewers’ experience and makes them want to see more.