Ashon Crawley’s “thy word have i hidden in my heart...(number 11)” goes up at New City Arts on Monday.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Ashon Crawley’s work as an artist begins with feeling. Growing up in a vibrant community of Blackpentecostalism, Crawley has a life perspective shaped by spirituality and rituals channeled through the body. He points to singing loudly, dancing, shouting, and speaking in tongues as influences in the way he expresses himself creatively, and these physical actions have manifested into tools in his visual art process.
In a performance he describes as “shouting on canvas,” Crawley uses music, clapping, dancing, and even tambourine rhythms to splatter and apply paint with his hands and feet.
Crawley’s desire to connect with the things he loves about his church exists in stark contrast with his aversion to its doctrine on queerness, and that conflict also informs his artistry.
The resulting work combines audio/visual montage with paintings that incorporate scripture, hymns, and concordance material into art that is bright and energetic, without losing the solemnity of its greater message.—Tami Keaveny
Ashon Crawley: “What my art practice is an attempt to do is to feel something akin to what I felt in the church world, but in a way that honors and allows to flower and flourish the complexity of queer relations and agnostic belief. So shouting on canvas with pigment powder on my feet to mark the surfaces with the residue of praise seems like a memorial and desire to be in dense relation with the world that made me possible. But it also is a critical intervention into its homophobia and transphobia and general antagonistic relation to nonheteronormative eroticism.”
Ed Haddaway's "An Even Larger and More Important Animal" draws influence from his time spent studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Winter gray getting you down? Les Yeux du Monde offers a potent dose of Southwestern heat in the form of paintings by Russ Warren and sculptures by Ed Haddaway that will banish those February blues.
The two artists, who are native Texans, met as students at the University of New Mexico in 1971, where they forged a friendship based on similar experiences and outlooks. Rejecting the abstraction then in vogue, they hankered instead for art that, as Warren puts it, showed the “touch of man.” Following graduation, Haddaway remained in Albuquerque. Warren moved east and the two lost touch. After a painting career that included teaching at Davidson College in North Carolina, Warren married Les Yeux du Monde director Lyn Warren, and settled in Charlottesville. Warren and Haddaway reconnected a couple of years ago, and realized that despite being separated by time and distance, they had been pursuing remarkably similar tracks all along.
“I chose ‘Surrealities’ as the title,” says Lyn Warren. “Because both Russ and Ed are interested in depicting imaginary worlds that evoke deeper truths. They value chance, humor, dream, and inner realities over external ones, and in similar fashion to the original surrealists of the 1920s, they favor the irrational over the solely rational, opting for a magical, dream-like, or humorous alternative.”
The surrealists were reacting to World War I and the instability and turmoil that followed. Finding their reality untenable, they rejected it, turning inward to their subconscious for inspiration. Warren and Haddaway came of age in a similarly chaotic time, at the height of the Vietnam War. Their work also rejects reality even as it retains a profound connection to its Southwestern surroundings.
Haddaway resists having his work labeled as “childlike.” It’s a tall order, given the bright colors, fanciful creatures, exuberant gumbo of shapes and underlying humor that permeates the work. But for Haddaway they are the creatures and objects that inhabit his imagination and visit his dreams. Thinking of them within the context of New Mexico, one can begin to see associations. In Native American mythology it wouldn’t be unusual for a man to be in conversation with a wolf as in “Meeting Mr. Wolf,” or for something like “An Even Larger and More Important Animal” to exist. The hand festooning the animal’s tail is both an ancient symbol and a humorous salute to the viewer.
In Haddaway’s larger works, the scale and color command attention, but he is able to sustain the interest in smaller works like “Click Clack Moon Metaphor” and “Wee House in the Forest.” A series of oxidized pieces, which seem made from organic matter, strike a subtler note. Haddaway’s monotypes are really appealing with their sophisticated palette and commanding, almost brutish gestures. The abbreviated images he produces are witty, edgily charming, and, yes, evoke Picasso.
Russ Warren, “Still Life with Curtains, 2018.” Image courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
You can tell that Warren revels in painting. The richness of the color, the texture, the energy, all convey a marked sensuality. Warren uses interactive acrylic paint to achieve a quality similar to the effect of oil, whisking the paint vigorously before he uses it. This creates bubbles that pop when applied, adding depth and texture to the work.
Warren’s recurring iconography has great personal meaning. There’s his dog Zeke, hit by a car shortly before his best friend was killed in a car crash that is both an homage to the adored pet and a stand-in for the friend. Guitars (Warren is a talented player) and other stringed instruments are represented, along with apples and half a watermelon.
Picasso and Cubism, in particular, are major influences. Warren is drawn to the fracturing of space that makes several views of an object visible at once, and the colorful flatness, simple shapes and use of dots that pervade his work are hallmarks of synthetic cubism. Take for instance “Still Life with Curtains,” a dynamic composition of abstract shapes with an arrangement of objects in front. The guitar, watermelon, and apples are all there, along with Zeke, curled up under the table. Here the dots not only add visual interest, they also veer into narrative, representing stars in the sky and watermelon seeds.
“The Ready Jester” reveals Warren’s eye for composition and color. The masks are Mexican, not African, with Day of the Dead connotations, and the turquoise, yellow, and orange evoke a southern border aesthetic. Horses and cows, a cat, and perhaps Zeke, are jumbled together to form a semblance of “Guernica” without the horror. On the left side, the background is a solid, smooth opaque, on the right, Warren introduces red and allows the brushstrokes to show.
A welcome seasonal respite full of joyful, eye-popping work, “Surrealities” also comes with a delightful backstory that speaks to the endurance of friendship and the power of personal convictions.
“Surrealities: The Art of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde through March 10.
