Tag: Pam Black

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In Living Black and White—with Shades of Gray: Colorless Expression Proves Lively in Second Street Gallery’s “She’s in Monochrome”

Laura Wooten's "Alentejo" series (this is "Alentejo 5") is now on view in the "She's in Monochrome" show at Second Street Gallery. Image courtesy Second Street Gallery

What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright?

Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have no basis of comparison. Yet in an interesting challenge, Second Street Gallery’s curator Kristen Chiacchia issued an invitation to local artists to create works that remove their usual reliance on color to express themselves. The resulting exhibition, “She’s in Monochrome,” now occupying SSG’s Dové Gallery until October 25, is surprisingly rich and varied, despite the black, white, and gray rules strictly governing the works on display.

Gray Dodson (whose very name along with fellow artists Sam Gray and Pam Black makes it seem as if she were practically born for this type of show) doesn’t stray from her aesthetic inclination to focus skyward, a go-to subject of hers along with landscapes and images of water. Devoid of her usual soft color interplay, “Big Rain” and “Place of Unknowing” are downright monolithic, with protuberances of cloudbursts taking on an Old Testament lashing out on the land in the former, while muddled sunlight struggles behind the wet wisps of the trees in the latter. We’re entering an unreal setting that’s gloomy but not without a dim glimmer of promise at its heart.

Krista Townsend’s views of the land in “Glacier” and “Vermont Woods” offer a more clear-cut sense of form and shadow in nature. By taking what comes across as a nearly two-dimensional approach while working within the confinement of greys, her work reveals a chilliness that is either a believable presentation of a steely-skied day or an icy night.

Providing an altogether different vision of landscapes, Laura Wooten’s five numbered “Alentejo” pieces expose verdant hillsides robbed of their greens and browns, eliciting colder images of south central Portugal. There’s something of Japanese sumi-e brush painting in her India ink and synthetic Yupo paper, as well; the stark pitch of the land loops and rolls, sliced by lightning bolt walking paths that catch the sun in cool forks, splaying the earth with serpentine pathways.

Nature nearly reaches its simulacrum breaking point in the grandmotherly floral patterns that have found a strange home in Lou Haney’s works on fabric and aluminum. The absence of bright pastels or cheerful shades on the petals of “Black Velvet If You Please” and “Quilt Gilt” are unsettling even to the colorblind eye. The Lycra, cotton, and beadwork feels more wrong than perhaps it should, but that very space is where the profound difference between expectation and this monochromatic reality plays most heavily upon both our senses and ability to interpret without the usual crutches or cues.

Considering the constraints of the show, perhaps the most vivid works come from Sam Gray, who presents mythical plant people occupying sharp locales that shimmer with fantastically cartoonish, stylized graphic qualities. “Cosmic Seed” reveals a being emerging from its plant pod and floating to celestial heights via its free-flying roots. In “New Stories,” the fungal woman ignores the jet goop dripping off her mushroom-capped head despite it getting everywhere—but with good reason, as she’s deep in ritual. Smoldering flame alights her blackened left hand while she draws with her right: a beginning, the start of a circle on a page, in black and white.

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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.