Tag: Second Street Gallery

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Melissa Cooke Benson explores life and body changes

Melissa Cooke Benson depicts the realities of motherhood using graphite on paper. “TBONE (Bingo Babies Only)” (left) and “The Fringe” (right) are part of her exhibition “Mom Brain” at Second Street Gallery. Courtesy of the artist

Artist Melissa Cooke Benson’s explorations in portraiture, long inspired by her daily life, have aligned with geographical moves, new and different cityscapes and cultures and alterations in her interior life, too. “With each life transition,” she says, “I’ve had to digest what’s going on around me and think of a way of incorporating what I do into those new surroundings.”

Her latest work comes after moving from New York to Minnesota and birthing her daughter, now 2 years old. While Benson has gone through phases of withdrawing as the subject of her artwork, when she became a mom, she says, “The body became very relevant again because everything I was dealing with was very corporeal. I began exploring what it means to be a mom and caregiver and have the entire self taken over by a small human for a while.”

“Mom Brain”
Second Street Gallery
Through May 11

In the title piece, “Mom Brain, 2018” Benson plays with the motif of a beautiful French braid, one of many, she says, that realists gravitate toward. “I like taking those tropes and putting them on their head. This is my French braid. My hair covered in stickers, Cheerios, crumbs, with lots of flyaways, standing in our bathroom that I tiled at 32 weeks pregnant,” she says.

The image was partially inspired when she and her husband, artist Erik Benson (whose exhibition “Monument” also appears at Second Street Gallery through May 11), invited a group of collectors to their respective home studios. While speaking with the collectors about her work, Benson, tending to her ill child who was 18 months old and teething, says she thought she was multitasking rather well until her friend pointed out after the fact that her daughter had been wiping snot in her hair the entire time.

“‘Mom Brain’,” Benson says, is about “the moment when you feel like you’re totally on point as a mom and then you leave the house and realize you have stickers on your butt or snot in your hair.”

In “Fringe,” a detailed rendering of one quarter of her head, Benson looks closely at the physical effects of childbirth, in this case, hair loss and regrowth. Six months postpartum, Benson started losing a lot of hair. One day she lifted her bangs to see a “fringe fresh halo of hair” growing underneath. The portrait, she says, is “based on a photo I took on my iPhone when I was using my phone as a mirror. It’s a quiet, reflective moment that’s kind of vulnerable and has a certain moodiness to it with the laundry and baby crib behind me.”

One motivation for this series of portraits, she explains, “is making artwork that’s not that ideal image of parenthood but those realistic things that only your girlfriends tell you about being a mom.”

While Benson’s portraits may look like pencil drawings, she actually creates them with graphite and a dry brush—a technique, she says, that was “born essentially out of frustration and experimentation.” When she was in graduate school, several professors insisted she took too long to complete drawings. Three people over the course of two months asked her if she’d tried using graphite. She happened to have a can of it sitting in her studio and “it felt essentially like fate,” says Benson. She took a watercolor brush and began dusting the graphite onto paper. “Four hours later, I left the studio looking like Pig-Pen, totally covered in graphite and totally excited, like I’d found my passion.”

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Murad Khan Mumtaz transcends divisions with Musavvari paintings

Murad Khan Mumtaz will teach a traditional Indian painting workshop at Second Street Gallery on January 13. Courtesy of the artist

Growing up in a family of artists and architects in Lahore, Pakistan, Murad Khan Mumtaz, a visual artist who practices the tradition of so-called Indian miniature painting, says the act of creating things came naturally.

“My father, who is a practicing architect, has more or less single-handedly tried to revive local indigenous practices, which were dying out,” Mumtaz says. “So I think I was greatly influenced by him, and by my elder brother who also is an architect.”

Mumtaz, who came to Charlottesville in 2012 to pursue his Ph.D. at UVA, says, “Prior to coming here, I don’t think I had much of an idea of my own history.” Now he studies 16th- to 18th-century representations of Indian painting as the focus of his degree in South Asian art history. “I have to dive deep into learning about the history itself, so that gave a lot of insight into things I didn’t know about, gaining more access to heritage, cultural history and the art form,” he says.

To understand Indian miniature painting, Mumtaz says one must begin with the name. In the Persian tradition, the Arabic name is Musavvari—the root of which comes from Al-Musavvir, one of the 99 most beautiful names of God in the Quran, meaning “the fashioner” or “creator of forms.”

In Sanskrit, the word is Chitrakala, and it translates to “the art of making images.” Because of the artworks’ origin in religious texts, they could be as small as pocket-size. When the British colonized India in the 19th century they named the artform “miniature painting.” Unfortunately, Mumtaz says, this simplistic name stuck.

Some of the earliest examples of Musavvari paintings can be traced to Buddhist and Jain manuscripts in the 10th and 11th centuries. But Mumtaz says, “The art form has a continuous tradition way back into early history, perhaps even prehistory.”

One of these influences came from the 16th century Mughal Empire, which brought Persian and Central Asian techniques to the medium. It continued to hold religious meaning, but also began to include the lives of the nobility. There are lots of landscapes, Mumtaz says, which serve as the backdrop for the protagonist. But the scenes also document battles and meetings. The tradition continued up to what Mumtaz calls a “decisive break” caused by colonialism.

Before Britain withdrew from India in 1947, it passed the Indian Independence Act, which partitioned India into India and Pakistan, and was the catalyst for the largest mass migration in human history.

“In that process, a lot of sectarian boundaries were demarcated and drawn,” Mumtaz says. “The history and heritage of one’s own culture was severed and lost. People had no access to local history or local mythologies or local heroes. Children growing up in India were brainwashed to think anything to do with Muslim culture was evil. It’s still happening viciously in both countries.”

Mumtaz came to realize that Musavvari painting “transcends sectarian division…It’s still steeped in contemporary practice but engaged in conversation with the tradition,” he says. It has become “a wonderful way of delving deeper into a practice to discover my own history and culture; a form of accessing my own severed history.”

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First Fridays: December 1

Ivy Naté’s large installation of stuffed animals of various shapes and sizes is featured in “Drawn to Charlottesville,” a show on view this month at Second Street Gallery. Courtesy of the artist

First Fridays: December 1

“Every artist starts with something inside themselves that feels true to them,” says sculptor and installation artist Ivy Naté. “I’m not sure what came first for me…balancing chaos and order, or reinventing the obvious.”

“I feel lucky that at times I am able to take some abstract shit in my head, interpret it and project it,” she says. Some artists work it out through song, through words, paint or clay. Naté works it out through stuffed animals.

For her large installations (the one she’s installed at Second Street Gallery this month is 13.3 feet long and 8.6 feet tall), she gathers stuffed animals of various shapes, sizes and personality that have been donated or discarded, and groups them together by color to create a massive wall hanging of furry, neon-colored, big-eyed nostalgia that Naté hopes will take viewers back to happier times, or to a past that has not yet been resolved. 

Strawberry Shortcake, sock monkeys, Miss Piggy, Paddington Bear—they’re all there, with Minions, Bart Simpson, a nameless green seal and a plush banana with eyes on its peel. Naté likes the idea of giving these discarded toys a “chance at a new life and bringing a fresh perspective on what most considered garbage.”

But what really intrigues her is why some stuffed animals become beloved friends and keepers of childhood secrets (inanimate furry family members, or IFFMs, as Naté calls them), while others don’t even have the tags removed before they’re handed down, given, or even thrown, away. What is it, she wonders, that makes people connect? —Erin O’Hare

GALLERIES

FF Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of Cass Kawecki’s recent watercolor and mixed-media paintings of Italy, exploring architecture, seascapes and memory. 5:30-7:30pm.

Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of work by Jane Angelhart, Jenifer Ansardi, Fax Ayres, Hallie Farley, Alex Gould, Jennifer Paxton and Peter Willard.

FF The Bridge PAI 2019 Monticello Rd. Eighth annual Gift Forest, featuring holiday gifts from more than 75 artists, designers and makers from all over Virginia. Open 11am-7pm weekdays, 10am-6pm weekends and 10am-4pm Christmas Eve.

FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “Various and Sundry Items,” featuring oil paintings of iconic objects on scrap metal by Michael Fitts, and fantastical hybrid characters made from scrap material by Aggie Zed. 5-7pm.

FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. “Memories from our Home Country,” a world art exhibit. 5:30-7:30pm.

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.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Our Big Dream: Creating the Dandelion Seed’s Story & Art,” highlighting the creative process behind Cris Arbo and Joseph Patrick Anthony’s children’s books, The Dandelion Seed and The Dandelion Seed’s Big Dream. December 9, 3-5pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Magical Patterns with Wood,” featuring patterned and ornamented wooden jewel boxes, backgammon sets, chess boards, decorated serving boards and marquetry pictures by Dave Heller. 6-8pm.

FF Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. “Aspen Series,” featuring oil paintings of aspens and landscapes by Melissa Malone. 5-7pm.

Farfields Farm & Center for Georgical Jubilism 40 Farfields Ln. “Mysterium Georgicus: The Inter-Dimensional Plow,” a multimedia installation by Masha Vasilkovsky and Ruah Edelstein, an artist duo known as Lumen Animae. For more information email gallery@farfieldsfarm.com.

FF Firefly 1304 E. Market St. An exhibition of watercolor and charcoal abstractions by Emma Brodeur. 5-8pm.

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 (through December 17); “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.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Karma,” featuring work by Lisa Beane that addresses privileged racism.

FF Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. “[tran-sekt],” an exhibition of aerosol and acrylic works on cradled birch panel by Monty Montgomery. 6-9pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “New Paintings and Works on Paper,” featuring work by Dean Dass.

FF Malleable Studios 1304 E. Market St., Suites T and U. “New Work,” featuring jewelry by Mia van Beek, Tavia Brown, Nancy Hopkins and Rebecca Phalen, and paintings by Karen Eide and Martha Saunders. 5-8pm.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. McGuffey holiday members show and gallery of gifts, featuring art and small handmade gift items, such as blown glass ornaments and textiles, for purchase. 5:30-7:30pm.

Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Abstract Landscapes‒Somewhere You May Live,” acrylic paintings with collage by Judith Ely.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Drawn to Charlottesville: A Group Exhibition of 12 Local Artists,” featuring work by Bolanle Adeboye, Chris Danger, Brielle DuFlon, Murad Khan Mumtaz, Clay Witt and other artists who moved to Charlottesville from elsewhere. 5:30-7:30pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Subversive/Domestic Textile and Fiber,” featuring cutting-edge textile and fiber pieces by American and Canadian artists; in the Members’ Gallery is “Small Works,” a show featuring work in a variety of media by SVAC member artists. December 9, 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Please Don’t Ask It Can’t Be Explained,” an exhibition of new collage works by Lisa A. Ryan. 5-7pm.

FF Telegraph Art & Comics 211 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Picture Show,” featuring ink and crayon originals and digital prints by Todd Webb. 5-7pm.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. A show of plein air watercolor paintings by Janet Pearlman; and “This is Charlottesville,” a photographic and story-based project by Sarah Cramer Shields. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Transient Places” oil on canvas by Kristen Hemrich. 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 Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St. “Postcards from Italy,” featuring petite watercolors by Jane Goodman, and an exhibit of oil paintings by Goodman and Elizabeth Dudley. 4:30-7pm.

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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Ed Woodham reclaims public space with Art in Odd Places

UVA visiting artist Ed Woodham will discuss art in public space on October 24 at UVA and on October 25 at Second Street Gallery as a launch for his AiOP: MATTER festival set for April. Woodham produces Art in Odd Places in collaboration with other artists to offer uniquely set works such as Crystal Gregory’s “Invasive Crochet.” Courtesy Ed Woodham

Each year, UVA’s student-run Arts Board Committee invites an artist to the University of Virginia. This year, in collaboration with the visual studio arts program, the students have invited New York-based artist Ed Woodham, founder and director of Art in Odd Places, a collaborative arts festival. Woodham will give two talks this month on the significance of art in public space, and in the spring he’ll collaborate with students, artists and the community to create an Art in Odd Places festival in Charlottesville.

Woodham says he created AiOP 13 years ago as “a challenge to the paradigm of homeland security after 9/11” when public space became much more regulated. Creating art in public spaces, he says, is a way of reclaiming those spaces and recognizing their importance “within the workings of our democracy. It’s where we gather and brush shoulders and come up with new ideas despite socioeconomic status, gender, race, persuasion,” he says. “It’s where we can be together, be change-makers.”

Now, he says, it’s also become about moving art from galleries, museums and theaters to make it more accessible to everyone, regardless of education or interest. There, in those public spaces, he hopes to interrupt the daily lives of passersby, to prod them out of their routine and inspire them to notice something new.

AiOP’s past installations have included crocheted snowflakes by Crystal Gregory inserted between barbed wire on a city street fence, and a performance piece called “White Trash” by Edith Raw, in which she dressed in transparent trash bags full of plastic bottles and other human-made trash. Woodham often contributes performance art to AiOP with whimsical and sometimes elaborate costumes that warrant a double take such as a Sasquatch-like suit or an all-white moving statue costume with a towering headdress.

In a 2014 TEDx Talk Woodham gave in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, he said, “In public space art can be shared and explored with a more fully democratic audience. And there it opens up the potential and the possibilities of creativity and communication.”

Three years later, he still feels that way. “It’s certainly a time to rethink the status quo,” he says. “…it might be a piece of art that will make you see. It activates the space and activates you because things are different.”

The UVA Arts Board Committee had already selected Woodham when Charlottesville’s public spaces became the epicenter of debate about history, racism, violence and free speech this summer. Woodham says that after August 12, Charlottesville’s festival, AiOP: MATTER, “became a whole new project.” It’s an opportunity, he says, “for the community of Charlottesville to weigh in on what they think this project should be. We’re listening to the community, both artists and non- artists—changemakers—on what they think this project should be.”

His talks this month, as well as the design and execution of the festival in the spring, offer the opportunity to re-examine our public spaces and experience them through a new creative lens.

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Second Street Gallery flirts with the dark side

Peter Benedetti’s “Solve et Coagula” is on display alongside Paul Brainard’s “My Body is a Grave” (above) at Second Street Gallery, now through November 17. Courtesy of the artist

Peter Benedetti never planned to make a deck of tarot cards. Instead, you might argue, the cards found him.

“It’s not something I would normally do,” says the Brooklyn-based artist, who points to the abstract expressionist influence on the style of his inventive drawings and paintings.

But a few years ago, during his daily research and quest for inspiration, he came across a tarot card.

“I only expected to do one, but I wound up putting it out into the world and people responded,” he says. “I got obsessed and did the whole deck.”

“A normal deck has 78 cards, and mine has 80 cards. Those extra two are wild cards that don’t mean anything. They just throw the viewer off,” he says. “People have described them as dark but whimsical.”

Allowing subconscious impulse to drive is a hallmark of Benedetti’s work. “I create a lot of different things. It’s fluid, stream of consciousness work,” he says. “When you’re doing this kind of art, you’re reacting. You react to what’s happening on the canvas and the paper. You may have an idea but it evolves into something else.”

For example, he came across a trove of drawings done by his girlfriend when she was just a child. She planned to throw them away.

“I thought they were amazing and wanted to collaborate with them,” he explains. “The innocence but evolved-ness [of child drawings] speak to me in the same way abstract expression does.”

Using construction paper and child’s scrawl as a canvas, he springboarded off oversized flowers, geometric houses and floating heads with stick arms, layering on detailed drawings of devils, deities and disturbing words in red and black and blue. (Think: “Brutal Fucking Murder” and “A Message to a Sick Society.”)

“I’m generally interested in the darker side of things,” says Benedetti, whose collaborative child drawings—as well as his Divine Will tarot project and assorted paintings and drawings—are currently on display at Second Street Gallery, along with artist Paul Brainard’s “My Body is a Grave.” (In a statement about his show, Brainard describes his intentional juxtaposition of puritan gravestones against pornography and homogenized culture as a means to illustrate “the void of substance in everyday life.”)

“Solve et Coagula,” the title of Benedetti’s exhibition, means “dissolve and concentrate.” It’s a motto, drawn from alchemy, that underscores Benedetti’s process: the collaborative interplay of the artist’s own subconscious with references to horror movies, the occult and stuff that “makes people uncomfortable”—like tarot.

“In my mind, there’s a stigma surrounding [tarot], like it’s some kind of voodoo that goes on. I envision it as something that scares people,” he says—and that appealed to him.

Benedetti spent two years creating his Divine Will tarot project, designing the cards one at a time on his computer using a limited palette: black, white and red.

“As I was designing the deck, I took a trip to Prague, which is an amazing place with gothic architecture and sculpture and dark-looking statues,” he says. “The King of Swords was inspired by a sculpture that I saw there.”

Others riff on Benedetti’s art history studies, referencing modern prints and Renaissance paintings, including Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment.” The King of Wands card was inspired by a horror movie poster featuring a portrait of Christopher Lee.

The artist’s interpretation of tarot has deepened considerably since he began the project. “Now I know about the history of [the tarot] and what it actually means,” he says. “In general, the first card in the deck is the fool. Most people would describe it as the fool’s journey. It’s the cycle of life. You start off not knowing anything, and as you get older and travel on your path, you learn things as you go. Depending on how the cards fall, it may or may not tell you something about yourself and what you should or shouldn’t be doing.”

Now that he’s finished his first deck, Benedetti plans to create another one.

Small wonder, given his affinity for following streams of personal experience and exploring whatever consciousness might arise. In the end, tarot cards might not be so unexpected a subject after all.

You might say it was always in the cards.

Magick man

The title for Peter Benedetti’s tarot deck, Divine Will, sprang from his discovery of Aleister Crowley, a 20th-century occultist who formed a religious philosophy called Thelema.

“The premise [of Thelema] was to follow your will in life,” Benedetti says. “You are your own god, and you decide your own destiny. I thought of the phrase divine will because the divine in yourself is basically your will, and it’s how you create your own future.” The Beatles, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne have all made references to Crowley on their albums.

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Two exhibitions connect through travel at Second Street Gallery

Stacey Evans’ landscape collage “Interdependence” is included in “Ways of Seeing” at Second Street Gallery. Evans will talk at the gallery on April 27. Courtesy of the artist

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.

"Navigation Chart #3," by Alonzo Davis. Courtesy of the artist
“Navigation Chart #3,” by Alonzo Davis. Courtesy of the artist

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.

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José Bedia brings new energy to Second Street Gallery

José Bedia’s “Memoria y Creencias Culturales/Memory and Cultural Beliefs” opens on Friday at Second Street Gallery. The artist will make brief remarks at 6:30pm Friday, and offer a longer presentation at the gallery at 1pm on Saturday. Courtesy of the artist

A new exhibit at Second Street Gallery might represent the start of a new era for the gallery. José Bedia, a renowned Cuban painter and sculptor, will visit the gallery February 3 for a solo show and other events.

Born in 1959 in Havana, Bedia studied Palo Monte, a branch of Congo-derived religion brought to Cuba by slaves. The religion evolved through the slaves’ contact with colonial Spain, Native Americans and other Caribbean cultures. One of Palo Monte’s most salient features is the use of a consecrated vessel called a caldero that functions like a small altar.

Bedia’s work is replete with references to Palo Monte, Cuban history, Native American spiritualism and tensions between imperialism and traditional cultures. The sacred calderos appear as regular motifs. He fills canvases with black silhouettes of slim human figures and animals that could have stepped out of European cave paintings, and he mixes perspectives like Salvador Dalí, sometimes adding sculptural elements to his paintings that reach out from the wall into the room toward the viewer. You’ll see rifles, aircraft carriers and airplanes being shot at with arrows.

“I don’t think he is critical of technology,” says Tosha Grantham, curator of Second Street Gallery and an accomplished scholar of Bedia’s work. “I would look at the difference between critical and critique. He calls it like he sees it. There are kindnesses in the world and there are cruelties. They each find a place in the work. Because he is a veteran, because he was a soldier [drafted to fight in Angola by the Cuban government], there’s a lot he has to say about warfare.”

According to Grantham, this is a big get for Second Street—or any gallery in any city.

“He’s very widely celebrated both within and outside the country,” Grantham says. “He’s one of the best-known Cuban artists working in the States right now. And he’s very modest about that. He is widely collected.”

Bedia is an art collector himself. He has traveled around the world, meeting indigenous peoples and learning about their religious and artistic practices.

“I think Bedia would claim his influences to be found in international indigenous artistry,” Grantham says. “People who are very close to whatever the energetic forces are that order the universe. …He’s very much like a field researcher or anthropologist. He spends time traveling and connecting with people.”

One of Bedia’s most well-known paintings is his depiction of a frog carrying a scorpion on its back, a reference to a fable that originated in the 1950s and has resonated in cultures around the world. The eye-catching piece is among the works featured in the show at Second Street.

“The scorpion is on the back of the frog and they get halfway across the river and the scorpion stings the frog,” Grantham says. “There’s an inevitability that there is a tendency to return to one’s nature. There are certain forces you can’t control. But then there’s also a great respect for nature.”

Grantham first became familiar with Bedia through a happy coincidence. His work had just been shown at an exhibition in Paris, and Grantham, an undergrad at the time, saw his Barcelona show in 1990.

It was that exhibition that caused Bedia to begin to blow up in the international art market and attract the attention of collectors and museum curators from around the world. Grantham would eventually devote part of her dissertation as a Ph.D candidate at the University of Maryland to Bedia. When she was first hired as Second Street’s curator in 2013, this was exactly the type of show she wanted to bring to Charlottesville.

“At the time I applied for the position it felt like this great bursting-at-the-seams moment where there was a lot of support for new ideas,” says Grantham. “So I mapped out the kind of program that would feature local, regional and national artists. Also, the gallery’s mission is to show art that might not otherwise be seen in Charlottesville.”

Grantham’s personal relationship with Bedia is a major part of how Second Street was able to draw him to Charlottesville, and Grantham hopes similar relationships with other artists will enable the gallery to continue punching above its weight class.

“We would certainly need a larger budget to keep doing this kind of show,” Grantham says. “This is possible in part through José [Bedia’s] generosity.”

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Observations on privilege and amnesia at Second Street Gallery

Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel’s (above)collaboration “contested bodies” is at Second Street Gallery through January 19. Courtesy Second Street Gallery

Despite living 2,100 miles apart, Charlottesville artist Matthew P. Shelton and Trinidadian artist Nikolai M. Noel are close friends.

They met in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, where they studied painting and printmaking, and were interested in the influence of colonialism and its aftermath on the creation of human identity.

“We were both making work about where we came from and where we come from,” Shelton says. “Noel quoted Heraclitus, ‘Geography is destiny.’ We’re focused on how the place you come from informs the possibilities and outcomes and ways you see the world.”

Noel, who currently lives in Port of Spain, describes himself as a multiracial artist who enjoys working conceptually, mashing up drawing, printmaking, painting and sculpture as the object requires.

Shelton, who lives in Charlottesville, prefers using collage, bricolage and found objects. “I’m descended from a lot people, but [my Confederate ancestry] is one strain I’ve been in dialogue with,” he says. “Particularly because my middle name is after my great-great-great-grandfather, who, according to historical documents, was a Confederate soldier and slaveholder.”

Unlike some friends, these two dive directly into topics that would otherwise divide them, consciously examining their identities in a holistic context.

“If you’re privileged, then it’s coming at the expense of someone else,” Shelton says. “You’re a member of the oppressor group. It doesn’t matter if you’re conscious of it or not. You’re receiving the benefit.”

Their latest exhibition is “contested bodies,” now on display at Second Street Gallery. Through drawings, prints, text, sculpture, film, audio and other media, the artists examine how our present realities—especially our day-to-day observations, opportunities and feelings—are shaped by race, privilege and historical and contemporary oppression.

As an example of identity-as-experience, Noel points to his “Disaster Series.” “These are about how I receive images of police shootings of young black men in the United States when I’m in the Caribbean,” he says. “They were images on the screen, so these are screen-sized. The dread and torment and sadness of those images made me think of Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War,’ which are also around that size.”

Noel “co-opted the language of Goya’s prints” to create his black-on-black images, which he intentionally made difficult to see and photograph.

“This is part of the conversation that Matthew and I have been having for a long time on race and nationality, about what is visible and what is invisible,” says Noel. “Being a white male in America—”

“And straight and able-bodied,” Shelton adds.

“—Matthew is probably in the category of one of the most visible human beings,” Noel says. “Me, being a multi-ethnic person from the southern Caribbean, living on an island most people don’t know exists, I live in a more invisible, obscure context.”

Shelton and Noel use “contested bodies” to translate the distance between them into an experience. Some subjects are easy to grasp. Smudged illustrations of palm trees; a massive black-on-black painting of Trayvon Martin’s sweatshirt. Others are difficult—a net made of chain, padlocks and steel hangs from the ceiling. A projector streams video of blood being drawn from both men and collected in two separate jars.

Curiosity, reflection and thoughtful conversation—the tools required to decipher “contested bodies”—is one treatment for what Shelton calls the “specific historical amnesia” of the American South.

“There’s a superficial memory about slavery and Jim Crowe and Civil Rights, but there’s not a personal memory that’s being cultivated,” he says.

Noel and Shelton say the purpose of their collaboration is “to bind our fates, further forge our friendship, to ward off depression and perhaps to inoculate ourselves from the fruits of the seemingly inexorable state of apartness characteristic of life today: anxiety, dread, exploitation, alienation from self and other, shame, lost futures.”

It is not, Shelton says, about racial reconciliation. “While that’s a project that is important in the world, we’re more focused on taking the temperature of what this moment feels like.”

“We talk a lot about justice,” Noel says, “and our sense of despair comes from understanding that in order to make things right and equitable, there is the whole weight of history to deal with. “

So how do these two men communicate clearly through the weight of despair?

“It’s a willingness to listen. The person might be saying something that’s difficult to hear, but once you express a willingness to listen, the other person has a willingness to be honest,” Noel says.

“Does listening come first or does trust come first? I would say that the onus is on white people to come to the table and listen,” Shelton says. “Stepping in and caring about these things—for me, it’s optional, but it has to become not optional.”

“contested bodies” challenges viewers to practice grappling with indistinct concepts. To challenge the assumption that powerful truths can be easily consumed and to experience the worthiness of people, ideas, emotions and experiences that are, at first glance, clouded by obscurity.

“Sometimes you have a map, and sometimes you’re dropped in the middle of nowhere,” Shelton says. “It’s like where you get born. Why did I get born where I was and to whom I was? Our collaboration is just having two people have that conversation, that expression of bewilderment, together at the same time.”

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Arts

Sonya Clark marks slavery history at Second Street Gallery

Sonya Clark’s “Encrusted” considers Abraham Lincoln’s role in black history through a sugar-coated $5 bill. Courtesy of the artist

Sonya Clark’s “Bitter, Sweet and Tender,” currently on view at Second Street Gallery, features sculpture, textiles and photography Clark has created, found or had fabricated. These objects limn a potent narrative encompassing Clark’s personal history and the troubled history of the U.S. and Caribbean centered on the use of people as commodities, examined through the lens of sugar production. Clark’s family hails from Jamaica, where sugarcane was, and continues to be, a major crop.

Sugar, along with cotton (in the American South), were the major drivers of the slave trade. “Sugar fed so much of the global economy,” says Clark. “The only way it could feed that global economy to the degree it did was by enslaving people and having them provide free labor.” Though slavery was abolished in 1838 in Jamaica, growing and harvesting sugarcane continues to be a grim reality for those laboring in the fields.

Many of Clark’s objects are painful to look at and consider. Some, like the “Confederate Battle Flag,” are obviously so. Others, like the “The Journey,” a length of gold thread on a spool that measures the distance between Ghana and Virginia (miles scaled to inches), require more attention to parse out.

Clark began unraveling Confederate flags because she was interested in seeing what it would mean to bring this fraught symbol down to its threads. Last year, in response to the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, she did an unraveling using a flag made from cotton (for obvious reasons). That flag could be completely unraveled because of the way a cotton flag is made. But, the aptly named “Unraveled Persistence,” a nylon version, which features a printed image, manages to retain the symbol and the flag’s shape even after all the weft threads have been taken out. So while Clark is doing the same action with both flags, the messages in the two pieces are very different.

“Monumental Cloth (old)” and “Monumental Cloth (new)” present two contemporary versions of the dishrag that was used as the flag of surrender at Appomattox. The original dishcloth was subsequently divvied up; half is in the Smithsonian American History Museum and other portions of it were distributed around the South. “That’s the flag we should be celebrating,” says Clark. “The Confederate Flag of Truce. That’s the piece of cloth and the symbol that brought our nation back together.”

“The Price” forces us to confront the commodification of humans in today’s economic terms. Working with her studio manager and assistant, Clark came up with an amount that she would command as a 48-year-old woman with craft skills. “We decided to take out the fact that I’d probably be someone who would want to try to escape, so as to make me more valuable, but still it’s only the price of a nice car, not even a fancy car,” says Clark. “And I would be owned for life. It was very uncomfortable for them [her manager and assistant] to do. And I told them, ‘It shouldn’t be comfortable.’

“It’s this ironic thing because…having slaves would be like having a luxury item, and having many of them would mean you were quite wealthy, right? Instead of having one Lexus, you’d have 10, or 50, and then the wealth breeds more wealth because of the free labor that the enslaved human beings were providing.”

The showstopper may be the bolt of McHardy tartan made from hand-woven bagasse (sugarcane fiber). It commands attention as a marvelous piece of emotionally charged craftsmanship that alludes to intertwining bloodlines. The tartan is Clark’s family’s; her maternal Jamaican great-grandmother married a man of Scottish descent in the 1870s. The piece weaves together the discarded sugarcane fibers, as well as Clark’s family history. As the bolt of woven cloth brings these ancestral threads together, it also simultaneously succeeds in unraveling certain preconceived racial ideas.

“Obviously, making an heirloom for my family is very, very close to me,” Clark says of the piece. “There’s earth from my family’s homestead in one vessel and there’s another that is holding indigo-dyed, handspun cotton that I’ve had since my very first trip to West Africa in 1989. So that piece means a lot to me.”

For Clark, the seminal piece is “Encrusted,” a $5 bill coated with crystallized sugar. “Bitter, sweet and tender, I feel like they’re all in that piece,” she says. By encrusting the bill with Lincoln’s visage on it, she’s drawing on sugar’s preservative qualities, trying to uphold what he was trying to do, even as there were challenges and complications surrounding it. The money is, of course, tender, but the circumstances surrounding Lincoln—the Civil War, his assassination and the failure of his reconstruction plan—are tender, as well. There’s also bitterness there. “We’re hardwired to believe that something bitter is poison,” says Clark. “But it also might be something medicinal that has healing properties.

“One of the things I wanted to bring to light in the show is the embedding of our past in our present,” she says. “That’s what I was doing with ‘Rebel Yell.’ It’s a roller coaster I rode as a child. …Here are all these brown and black kids going down 95 to get to King’s Dominion to get on this roller coaster and have a good time. It did not occur to any of us, much less our parents, that that roller coaster was named for the Confederate battle cry. I think it’s really interesting to bring to light that embedding. The repercussions of slavery—how much wealth we have in this nation because of the enslavement of people and how much it still replays in our present, in our subconscious. So I’m trying to bring some of those subconscious things into our consciousness so that we can actually dig at the roots of this troubled history and attempt to right the ship.”

Her voice and perspective are critical right now in our national dialogue. “Looking at what’s happening across the country and with this upcoming election, I would say, ‘Maybe we’ve taken some steps forward, but whoa, maybe we’ve taken some steps backwards,’” she says.

Clark’s bitter, sweet and tender work helps us understand where we have been. It is only then, armed with this information, that we can move in that forward and ultimately redemptive direction.