Nature underfoot at Seton Gallery

Seton Art Gallery at the University of New Haven
Dodds Hall, University of New Haven, 300 Boston Post Rd., West Haven, (203) 931-6065
Constructed Ecology

The first thing I notice when entering the Seton Gallery to check out Constructed Ecology is the smell of grass (the lawn type). The floor is covered with sod and the gallery space is sectioned off, creating two cubicles. The juxtaposition of structure and a signifier of the natural environment—living grass—challenge visitors to contemplate our relationship to nature. The exhibit is the joint effort of summer artists-in-residence Michael Galvin and Kyle Skar with the multimedia interventions of Lisa Amadeo, Nicki Chavoya and Gary Velush.

While the grass is in one sense a signifier of nature it is also an archetypal example of the domestication of nature, the human urge to dominate and control nature. The sod is laid down in rectangular segments, like a living living room carpet. The visitor's experience as one walks through the gallery is symbolic of the human impact on nature—taking it for granted, trampling it underfoot.

According to gallery director Laura Marsh, the grass is watered twice a day. Still, much of it just clinging to life, brown and dispirited. But in corners and hugging the walls along the well-trod paths, green tangles endure.

Photo from the "Constructed Ecology" opening courtesy of Seton Gallery

The architectural structures function on two levels, serving both to break up the space into geometric pathways and to create rooms housing the multimedia responses of Amadeo, Chavoya and Velush. The first "room" I enter features the looping video piece "Digital Window" by Nicki Chavoya and Lisa Amadeo. The video is a succession of scenes overlaid with found sounds, bits of banal everyday conversation and static. The video, filmed throughout New England, features scenes of bucolic woods, views of suburbia, piles of freshly cut wood in a forest clearing, cats feeding at their bowls, big box retail stores. The accumulation of imagery suggests a deep undercurrent of alienation and even looming threat. The serenity of one suburban scene is belied by the fact that Amadeo and Chavoya have filmed a cul-de-sac, the dead end of the growth imperative. In another short clip—in what I have to believe was a highly fortuitous circumstance—they captured a big truck for "Global Environmental Services" turning a suburban corner like something out of a Don DeLillo novel. All is not well in paradise.

"Digital Window": Video by Lisa Amadeo and Nicki Chavoya

In the other cubicle, Gary Velush set up a sound installation incorporating readings of the work of James Joyce, natural and mechanical sounds, strange rumblings. This cubicle is more enclosed, claustrophobic. The plywood walls are painted black with the exception of numerous unpainted areas in which the wood grain looks like ghostly figures with the knots for eyes. Cut into the walls are six portals, which are painted gold. Within each portal, Michael Galvin has placed a couple of plaster casts of mushrooms daubed with gold paint. The environment references altered states, heightened sensory awareness, magic and the spiritual quality of nature.

Constructed Ecology, which is open through Oct. 26, prompts contemplation of our relationship to nature. In thinking about that I return to the sensory image at the start of this post, that of the smell of grass when I entered the gallery. Gallery director Laura Marsh sent me photos from the opening and one of the striking things is how green and fresh the ersatz lawn looked. In its decay, this aspect of the installation speaks volumes. We were given paradise and have put up a parking lot.

Opening tonight: "Constructed Ecology" at Seton Gallery at UNH

Seton Art Gallery at the University of New Haven
Doods Hall, University of New Haven, 300 Boston Post Rd., West Haven, (203) 931-6065
Constructed Ecology
Sept. 19—Oct. 26, 2013.
Reception: Thurs., Sept. 19, 5—9 p.m.

Press release from Seton Art Gallery

Constructed Ecology aims to enhance the viewer's spatial perception using light, sound, video and texture. When entering the gallery space, one is confronted with two luminescent cubes in a field of grass. These architectural vessels create tension between themselves and the triple L-shaped gallery. This spatial narrative is akin to the first day of spring, recalling the feeling of grass beneath one's feet as one takes in a deep breath of fresh air.

The exhibit will be on view through Oct. 26. An opening reception is scheduled for Thurs., Sept. 19, from 5—9 p.m.

This exhibition blurs the lines of the natural and the engineered. Subsequently, the notion of "viewing" space and "passage" through space is inhibited, forcing the viewer to slow down and interact with the work. The installation encourages one to challenge their perception of curated and regulated spaces from that of nature and the wilderness.

Seton has become more experiential as two artists, Michael Galvin and Kyle Skar, work for one month as artists-in-residence. They have customized the gallery and used it as an incubator for a large-scale project. This discovery aims to challenge the traditional views of exhibition space through an interaction with the existing architectural space. Galvin and Skar have invited two local video collaborators Lisa Amadeo and Nicki Chavoya to develop and project video content within one of the architectural vessels. Gary Velush will customize an auditory piece in the second space. Within this interdisciplinary exhibition, a variety of sensory experiences will be produced.

Constructed Ecology raises questions and draws awareness to the built environment, encouraging viewers to seek out natural spaces. This interdisciplinary project combines architecture, sculpture, digital media and natural forms resulting in conversations about manufactured experiences and the air we breathe. This discourse is relevant to the development of the Seton Gallery as a cultural center for both the University and the New Haven community.

Jamie Sneider and MaryKate Maher shows open at Real Art Ways on Thursday

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Jamie Sneider: Art My Dad Told Me to Make
MaryKate Maher: Auspicious Positions
Jan. 17—Mar. 31, 2013.
Opening reception during Creative Cocktail Hour: Thurs., Jan. 17, 6—8 p.m. Admission is $10/$5 Real Art Ways members.

Press release from Real Art Ways

The first Creative Cocktail Hour of 2013 is the opening reception for the two newest installations at Real Art Ways: Art My Dad Told Me to Make by Jamie Sneider, and Auspicious Positions by MaryKate Maher. Both exhibits will be ondisplay through Mar. 31, 2013. Creative Cocktail Hour runs from 6—10 p.m.; the openings occur until 8 p.m. Admission is $10/$5 for Real Art Ways members.

For Art My Dad Told Me To Make, Jamie Sneider presents footage and materials of ongoing studio visits, Skype meetings, voicemails and emails documenting the process of making art with her father. Mr. Sneider, a Certified Public Accountant with experience in many startup and emerging companies has regularly mailed business, career and motivational books to his daughter to push her to become a successful businesswoman, and often ignored her pursuit of a career in art. When he began to give advice on what kind of art she should make, she conceded, and together they created and outsourced multiple works of art. What began a year ago as a project focused on her father's view of "saleable" art has slowly evolved into a work about their relationship, how art is valued and defined, and how they individually view a successful artistic career.

Jamie Sneider: "Art My Dad Told Me to Make"

Jamie Sneider is a visual and performance artist working in New York City. Much of Sneider's interdisciplinary work begins from a personal diaristic standpoint, revealing taboos and idiosyncrasies present in daily life. She draws from both pop culture references and personal archives to explore narratives of family, female sexuality, media culture and social norms. Through sculpture, performance and video, she examines identity within a public space; the content is both autobiographical and analytical of culture, often with humorous tone. Jamie Sneider is a recipient of Real Art Ways' STEP UP 2012 Emerging Artist Award, and has previously performed solo shows throughout New York at Performance Space 122, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, HERE and the Atlantic Theater, and internationally at the Copenhagen Theater Festival.


In Auspicious Positions, MaryKate Maher presents a suite of sculptures addressing our traditional concepts of landscape. Born of her interest in "cairns"—piles of rocks used as simple markers to map terrain, the works comment on our at times quixotic attempt to domesticate and manipulate nature. Reminiscent of divination tools, naturally occurring balancing rocks and rough-hewn talismans, Maher's work speaks to a natural order that is more precarious negotiation than harmonious coexistence.

MaryKate Maher: "Auspicious Positions"

MaryKate Maher is a sculptor from Brooklyn, New York. Her work as an artist addresses nature, not as a harmonious self-regulating state, but as a series of tenuous negotiations and truces liable to fall apart at any second. At times terrifying, at times humorous, these fragile states of balance straddle the line between ecstasy and panic and form the basis of her sculptural practice. Maher's work has been recently featured in national venues including Hinge Gallery (Chicago), BRIC Rotunda Gallery (New York), Like the Spice Gallery (New York) and Franconia Sculpture Park (Minnesota). Her work has also been presented internationally at Kunstwerk Carlshütte (Büdelsdorf, Germany) and Das Gift Gallery (Berlin). Auspicious Positions is Maher's first solo exhibition with Real Art Ways, through STEP UP 2012.

Reception for "Mondoexpressionism" show at New Haven Public Library Saturday

New Haven Free Public Library Art Gallery
133 Elm St., New Haven
Elisa Vegliante: Mondoexpressionism
Aug. 6—Sept. 8, 2012.
Artist's reception: Sat., Aug. 11, 2—4 p.m.

Press release from Azoth Gallery

Welcome to the world of “Mondoexpressionism” a term created by artist Elisa Vegliante that can be roughly translated as "Beyond ‘The Scream.’" Reaching for words to describe her massive, iconoclastic body of work, clichés like "poignant", "provocative" and other recycled expletives are impotent and absurd.

Arty Fields of The Patterson Review of Art notes that by “combining the expressionism of Edvard Munch with the personal visual documentation of Frida Kahlo, Vegliante’s … [oil on canvas] paintings merge elements of inner psychology with events in the material world to form a haunting, disturbing, enlightening and completely unique body of work… Her paintings vividly illustrate the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of characters and events, the spiritual motivation behind things, rather than the things themselves. Her bold and shameless paintings make for an ongoing cultural diary of Western Civilization’s mass hysteria at the breaking point.”

Vegliante also stars in husband Ace Fronton’s backyard films as the eccentric actress, Yahuba Daley, such as in the astonishing (to this viewer), feature-length "Seven Ghastly Sins." These films, like Vegliante’s paintings, are multidimensional vignettes of psycho/social commentary in motion picture format, giving voice to another facet of the artist’s boundless creativity. A sampling of these video films will be shown at the artist's reception, August 11th.

Even in death, Wojnarowicz a target as censors come knocking

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
David Wojnarowicz: A Fire in My Belly
On display indefinitely.

The culture wars are back.

Of course, we haven't been truly free of them since the heated battles of the early 1990's over such controversial art world touchstones as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" and the NEA Four—performance artists (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, John Fleck) whose grants were overturned in a display of mewling self-censorship by the National Endowment for the Arts Executive Director at the time John Frohnmayer.

But with the ascension of a GOP majority in the House of Representatives coinciding with a new Depression, the need for corporate-oriented conservatives to displace economic anxieties onto cultural anxieties—and the power to do so—has once more become acute.

The target, as in the early 1990's, is gay sexuality and its expression in art. The catalyzing event in this current contretemps was the reaction by right wing blogger Penny Starr to the inclusion of a four-minute excerpt from the late David Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in My Belly" in Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Wojnarowicz, who died of complications of AIDS in 1992, created "A Fire in My Belly" as both a cri de coeur and cry of rage over the ravages of the disease in the gay community and societal indifference to the toll.

In response, Real Art Ways in Hartford—and many other arts spaces around the country—is showing Wojnarowicz's video as a protest against censorship and an act of solidarity with demands for intellectual and artistic freedom. (Real Art Ways is showing a different four-minute edit of the Wojnarowicz piece.)

According to information posted on the Web site of the National Portrait Gallery, Hide/Seek "is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture." The exhibition "considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern America; how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art—especially abstraction—were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment."

Right wing, homophobic bigot William Donohue of the Catholic League, which has no official connection to the Roman Catholic Church, then got into the act, too. While Starr and Donohue recoiled that an exhibit dealing sympathetically with same sex attraction was being shown in the federally-funded auspices of the National Portrait Gallery (albeit with private funding for the show), they were particularly exercised by short snippets in the Wojnarowicz video of ants crawling over a Jesus on a small crucifix.


After John Boehner, the incoming Speaker of the House, and Eric Cantor, incoming majority leader, "called for the dismantling of an exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery after they learned that it contains video of a Jesus statue with ants crawling on it, as well as works of art with strongly sexual themes," as reported by The Hill on Nov. 30, the Smithsonian caved and removed Wojnarowicz's video.

The art world response was almost immediate. The next day, Transformer, a Washington, D.C. contemporary art space, downloaded a four-minute version of Wojnarowicz's video and began showing it in their storefront window. Transformer Executive and Artistic Director Victoria Reis organized a protest for Thursday, Dec. 2. Some 100 protesters—many covering their faces with masks of Wojnarowicz's face—watched the video and then marched to the steps of the National Portrait Gallery where they stood in silent vigil. In a creative new media tactic since then, some anti-censorship activists have gone to the Hide/Seek exhibit and browsed the works while wearing iPads playing "A Fire in My Belly" in a silent, continuous loop.

Will Wilkins, executive director of Real Art Ways in Hartford, took the helm of that organization in 1990, just as the culture wars hit their boil. When the NEA Four had their grants yanked, Wilkins contacted the four artists the next day and invited them to Hartford. Real Art Ways presented shows by each of the NEA Four in Hartford and also arranged for some shows in New Haven and Northampton in Massachusetts.

In an interview at Real Art Ways last week, Wilkins tells me that the Internet has facilitated anti-censorship organizing this time. When Wilkins heard Transformer was showing the video, he contacted Reis the next day and asked how she got a copy. Told they got it off YouTube, Real Art Ways did the same and. The video is showing indefinitely on a continuous loop in the video room. Additionally, Real Art Ways obtained permission from P.P.O.W. Gallery, which represents Wojnarowicz's estate, to show both a longer version of "A Fire in My Belly" and the profound "Untitled (One Day This Kid...)" poster featuring a picture of Wojnarowicz as a young boy and his lacerating text describing his experience of oppression as he embraced—and was tormented for—his sexuality. The Wadsworth Atheneum, which has an original of "Untitled (One Day This Kid...)," is also showing it in solidarity with the anti-censorship campaign.

"It wasn't a hard decision to make," Wilkins says. "Part of our mission—at the center—is support for artists. This is very clearly an act of self-censorship on the part of the Smithsonian."

While Wilkins believes anti-gay bigotry and not religion is behind the outcry by Starr and Donohue, he doesn't dispute their right to express their criticism. What Wilkins finds more troubling are the statements from Boehner and Cantor suggesting the Smithsonian's funding is at risk over the work.

"It's kind of chilling when you look at Congressmen making threatening statements like that, threatening and bullying behavior," says Wilkins. "They're trying to push the Smithsonian around.

"This is not about Real Art Ways saying 'we can't be censored.' It's about a national institution," Wilkins says. "It's about the whole idea that you don't apply a political litmus test to people working in museums, or in academia. If they are good at what they do, let them do it. This isn't the former Soviet Union. There is such a thing as intellectual and artistic freedom."

Wilkins is pleased at the extent of the anti-censorship response.

"Places all over the country and internationally are sharing it. That's really exciting to me. It could be a sense of solidarity with the idea of the original exhibition at the Smithsonian. There are certain values worth standing up for," argues Wilkins. "In some ways, there is some good that's already come out of it because of people's prompt and unified response." Because of the resistance to the act of censorship, Wilkins contends, "More people have become aware of David Wojnarowicz's work."

Accompanied by a Diamanda Galás soundtrack, the version of "A Fire in My Belly" showing at Real Art Ways is four minutes of gut-wrenching intensity, notwithstanding the low resolution of the Web-sourced video. Blood drips into a bowl, coins drop into a hands of a beggar. Faces of anguish flash on the screen. Large carcasses of meat are hung up. A man undresses and starts to masturbate in semi-darkness. Fire-breathers belch flames in the Mexican streets where the video was shot. Quick cuts show mummified figures, their gaunt visages akin to those of end-stage AIDS patients. Images of two halves of a loaf of bread being stitched together are juxtaposed with painful footage of Wojnarowicz himself having his mouth literally sewn shut, an allusion perhaps to the silence of government officials, medical professionals and clergy that condemned thousands to lonely and painful deaths. (One of those thousands was my youngest brother, Peter Judge, a gentle soul and wonderful investigative journalist who died of complications of AIDS in February, 1991 at the age of 30.) And then there are the ants crawling over Jesus on the crucifix, an image of suffering in the face of social passivity.

THE P.P.O.W. Gallery and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz addressed the controversy over the ants in an official statement:

On behalf of the estate, the gallery would like to offer the artist's words to illuminate his original intentions. In a 1989 interview Wojnarowicz spoke about the role of animals as symbolic imagery in his work, stating, "Animals allow us to view certain things that we wouldn't allow ourselves to see in regard to human activity. In the Mexican photographs with the coins and the clock and the gun and the Christ figure and all that, I used the ants as a metaphor for society because the social structure of the ant world is parallel to ours."

"Silence equals death" was the Act-Up slogan and Wojnarowicz's art was forged in that crucible of activism and agitation for life.

"His work is so strong and so reflects that horrible time," says Wilkins. "Watching the four-minute video is so visceral. It brought back the feeling of a time that's gone. It's almost impossible to describe to people who weren't there what it was like. I think of all the family and friends we lost—people who were creative people who would still be in our lives, creativity that would be part of our lives that's gone. It makes me feel particularly strongly about showing this work and saying stop the bullying, stop the gay bashing. Stop it!"

Ryan Brennan show opens this evening at Real Art Ways in Hartford

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Daxin Wu: Currency Portraits
Dec. 16, 2010—Feb. 13, 2011.
Opening reception and Creative Cocktail Hour on Thurs. Dec. 16, 6—8 p.m.

Press release

Close Your Eyes and Look As Far As You Can See, an exhibition by Ryan V. Brennan at Real Art Ways, invites viewers to become participants in the world in unexpected, whimsical and often humorous ways using collage, video and performance art. The exhibition will be on view through Feb. 13, 2011.

There will be an opening reception for the show on Thurs., Dec. 16, 2010 from 6—8 p.m. as part of Creative Cocktail Hour, Real Art Ways' monthly gathering for creative people. Creative Cocktail Hour is $10/$5 for Real Art Ways members.

The show's title work, Close Your Eyes and Look As Far As You Can See, is what Brennan calls a "cinemallage": a piece that serves as the set and viewing platform for a stop animation movie. In this work, a dreaming young man—embodied in a plastic toy astronaut—explores a vibrant utopian landscape. Told in the naive language of a fairytale, the story belies a deeper narrative of the quest for self-discovery.

The exhibition will also include Brennan's Living Exercises Project, a series of instructions designed to facilitate introspective, cathartic and enlightening experiences. Exercises include "Hold Hands with a Stranger" and "Ten-Minute Communal Solitude and Silence." The exhibition displays footage of people performing the exercises, and there will be bound books of instructions available at the opening.

Also in the Real Art Ways galleries, Olu Oguibe's Wall and Saya Woolfalk's Institute of Empathy are on display through March 20, 2011.

Ryan V. Brennan (b. Cincinnati, Ohio 1982) has exhibited in Chicago, New York City, Miami, Richmond and San Francisco as well as internationally in France. He has shown in Scope New York 10, Scope Miami 09, Scope Hamptons 07 and LA Art Fair 08/09. Ryan received the Jonathan Madrigano Fellowship for the Arts through the National Arts Club in 2010.

He also was the recipient of a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2006 and has been featured in a variety of publications including The New York Times, Beautiful/Decay LA, Daily Serving, The Sunday Paper, Atlanta, Biscayne Times Miami, and Savannah Morning News.

Artist Statement:

Cinemallage Series 2008-09

Cinemallage: pieces that are simultaneously the set and viewing platform for stop animation movies.

Housed within each collage is a video player displaying chapters of an imaginative tale of a young mans journey through a future utopian fantasy world where he learns how the power of imagination can make a change in the world around him. This story employs the naïve language of fairytale as a vehicle to engage several real issues in today's society evoking hope and community in a trying time of uncertain future.

Following the protagonist through this future utopian world we come across many characters who discuss various concerns we face today such as recession, credit and mortgage crisis, global warming, social inequality, and modern food production. The characters give insight into how they overcame such challenges and offer the power of imagination as a means for hope for a better future.

Living Exercises Project 2009-10

An ongoing performance project based on a series of instructions to be done sometimes privately or publicly, aimed to broaden one's perspective personally and socially. Recorded in the form of an instructional handmade book of exercises to be done along, with friends, family and strangers, the series facilitates introspective, cathartic and enlightening experiences. Included with the handmade books are DVDs documenting several recent performances described within the book.

Real Art Ways' "Rockstone and Bootheel" exhibit showcases richness of contemporary West Indian art scene

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art
Through March 14, 2010.

Rockstone & Bootheel, the show of contemporary West Indian art on display at Real Art Ways is a glorious, overwhelming labor of love. Real Art Ways Director of Visual Arts Kristina Newman-Scott, who co-curated the show with Yona Backer, is originally from Jamaica. The exhibition features the work of almost 40 artists from the West Indies—the English-speaking Caribbean islands—and the diaspora. More than half the artists are being shown in the United States for the first time. Real Art Ways is a fitting venue for the show as Hartford has the third largest West Indian population in the United States (after New York city and Miami).

There is no overarching theme but there is an organizing principle: the mashup. Newman-Scott says the use of the mashup aesthetic for the exhibit appropriately reflects life on the islands. Culture in its various manifestations—visual arts, music—is woven into the fabric of daily existence.

This curatorial decision makes for a challenging viewing experience. Videos run on continuous loops, offering a nonstop soundtrack of background noise not always conducive to concentration. (A Rasta man's declamation's in Jayson Keeling's wall-projected video "Listen Without Prejudice" makes particularly insistent claims on one's attention.) I had walked through the show at the opening and returned for an extended view last November. Even then, having the gallery to myself for an hour or more, felt insufficient. To do justice to this exhibit necessitated a return visit the beginning of this month.

That's largely due to the fact that this is a show fully within the mainstream of contemporary art. Which is to say that the emphasis as much on the play of ideas as it is on the display of visual creations. Rockstone & Bootheel—the title is derived from a Jamaican "dub metal" track and alludes to taking a journey—can certainly be appreciated on a surface level; there is a lot of well-made art here. Among the media on display are sculpture, paintings, photography, installations, video (the latter being a notably time-based medium).

But just as important are the animating constructs and what they say about contemporary West Indian identity. These works explore the fraught racial history of the British West Indies, class, gender and sexuality issues and the problem of rampant violence and crime.

A work like Sonya Clark's "Iterations" is an example of how meaning must and can be teased out of these pieces. "Iterations" is a floor installation made up of hundreds of black plastic combs. Fastened together, the combs fan out from the wall like the spreading branches of a tree or its roots, the tool evoking the object worked upon. It inspires a plethora of associations: linguistic, cultural, visual. On the cultural level, the installation brings to mind the nature of hair as a cultural signifier, both because it uses combs but also because it looks in some ways like an upside-down Afro hairstyle. By suggesting the notion of "roots," it layers further meanings: hair roots, the roots of trees, the notion of heritage and the reggae gloss on "roots" as signifying authenticity.

Mounted on the wall next to "Iterations" is Nadine Robinson's "Laquita," a sculpture made of synthetic hair fiber, mbf board and hairpins. "Laquita" was inspired by Robinson's memories from her youth of a girl with fantastic hair—Laquita—but also of a memorable block party. As with Clark's "Iterations," the piece highlights the importance of hair and hairstyle in the culture. But, according to curator Newman-Scott, it also references the ornate facade of a building Robinson recalls from the block party. It is an intricate weaving, a landscape of braids and interconnection. That interconnection has a symbolic dimension. It speaks to the way people are "woven" into places, culture, time.

Hair also plays a role in the prints by Joscelyn Gardner, a white artist from Barbados. Her series of hand-colored stone lithographs on frosted mylar succeed as disciplined drawings. But they are also a powerful example of an aesthetic in which tradition, culture and nature are enlisted in a reproach to the oppression of slavery. Each print consists of three elements: a representation of an intricate African braided hairstyle, symbolic of proud femininity; a type of metal slave collar used to demean and punish women who resisted the control of their bodies; and native plants that were used as abortafacients to deny the slaveholder another generation.

In the depictions of the hairstyles and the slave collars, the viewer sees the human creative impulse in both its Eros and Thanatos forms. The inclusion of the abortafacient plant completes the image. Symbolic of the way slavery perverts human relationships, the plants represent a perversion of the human relationship to nature—seeking solace in nature's capacity to prevent life rather than enrich life.

Two works in one gallery evoke different migrations in different media. Barbadian artist Annalee Davis' 30-minute video "On the Map" is a documentary on "intra-regional migration." It depicts the struggles of migrants within the region in an era of ideological "free trade." In reality, "free trade" is a regime in which capital moves freely across borders—disempowering and impoverishing masses of people—while bureaucratic, legal and cultural barriers to human movement remain strong. An analogy could be made to the slave trade that forcibly relocated Africans to the Caribbean under the auspices of that era's reigning economic system. Slave traders were "free" to move humans (capital) across borders while the enslaved had no rights at all.

If the African experience in the West Indies began in the oppressive rupture of slavery and the Middle Passage, Christina Leslie's portraits of family and friends ("EveryTING Irie") represent a different type of passage, freely chosen emigration to Canada. Leslie interviewed her subjects about their struggles and successes in Canada. Their recollections, in patois, are quoted as text at the bottom of each image. The 20x24 color prints are styled like old reggae or ska LP covers, the portraits of proud black faces situated within the pan-Africanist tints of red, green, gold and black.

The ubiquity of these tints might be the one formal aspect running through the exhibit. They recur in Lawrence Graham-Brown's "Ras-Pan-Afro-Homo Sapien," a mixed media mannequin displayed in the center of the main gallery. Like many of the works in the show, this piece deals with the charged issues of gender and sexuality. An openly gay Jamaican artist residing in the U.S., Graham-Brown confronts the island's notoriously homophobic culture with a mashup that co-opts and subverts its iconography.

A mannequin torso is outfitted in a tunic—painted in the Garveyite colors of red, black and green—of the militant style popular in reggae dancehall culture. Effecting a militant synthesis, Graham-Brown bedecked the tunic with buttons depicting icons of Black Power in both its political and cultural manifestations (Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, presidential campaign pins for Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama) along with gay signifiers—Diana Ross, Boy George. A button reading "I [Heart] Boys" sits just above a pin reading "Free At Last" with an image of Nelson Mandela. The "Jackson for President" button is something of a two-fer, with its rainbow and "Follow the Rainbow" exhortation, evoking both Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and contemporary gay culture's embrace of the rainbow.

Artists O'Neil Lawrence and Jayson Keeling appear to address sexuality issues in more oblique ways. Keeling's short video "Jesus speak of me as I am" pairs slowed-down footage of Rasta men walking through the ghetto with Lou Reed singing "Jesus" with the Velvet Underground. Slowed-down, the Rastas' purposeful walk reads more like a sashay, imbuing the macho strides with a suggestion of femininity.

In O'Neil Lawrence's large color photographs nude black men stand on the shore, their backs symbolically turned on a culture that rejects gay people. That's one reading, an essentialist interpretation in which nude men=homoeroticism. (Lawrence, according to Newman-Scott, does not identify himself as a gay man.) Another reading might be that the men are looking back toward Africa. Their nakedness, in this take, could represent a disrobing of imposed European culture, symbolized by a discarded bolt of white cloth in one of the pictures.

Several artists, including Simone Leigh, Jamie Lee Loy and Renee Cox, address women's place in West Indies society. Cox's photographs depict the artist as an upper middle class black housewife, struggling to keep it together within the constraints of class and gender roles. Leigh's installation features a metal "Cage" enclosing a kiln-like setup, "Yellow Stack," and a number of basins, "Containers," filled with ceramic and metal replicas of West Indian produce like plantains. There are shapes evoking gourds, breasts. Several of the latter objects have boot sole imprints. The installation invokes the dualities of oppression and abundance, nurturing and violence.

Domestic violence is also the subtext of Jamie Lee Loy's "The Roach," a wall sculpture. The large fat cockroach climbing the wall is composed of live flower petals stuck to the wall with silk pins. It represents the anguish and violence inherent in some domestic settings, the roach symbolic of the invasion of a supposed safe place. Flowers are often used as a bribe or apology in the wake of an act of domestic violence, their beauty hijacked to an agenda of control. Pinned to the wall last November, the petals are decaying. Their beauty fading daily, more and more they symbolize death rather than life.

Ebony G. Patterson's "Endz-Khani & Di Krew I-III," described in the press materials as either part of her "Gangstas for Life" or "Disciplez Series," is an installation that takes up much of the back wall of the main gallery. The work portrays three young men, gangsta wannabes perhaps, in large photos made up of nine panels each. Each young man stands as if on display but with a "don't fuck with me" countenance, trying to project machismo. It is this macho pose that Patterson is out to critique and deconstruct.

Each of the youths has their faces bleached—alluding to the practice in Jamaican dancehall culture of skin bleaching. But Patterson goes further. She has colored their lips to look as though they are wearing lipstick and decorated them with pink and red sequins and glitter. She cut stencils, many in the shape of fish, out of the lower photo panels. "Fish" is Jamaican slang for a gay man. Their heads are surrounded by lace and gold doily halos. At their feet are strewn deep piles of fake flower petals and "pussy bullets" - painted tampon dispensers. I wonder how the subjects of these portraits would react to their fanciful portrayal.

It's hard to do justice to such a sprawling show. Among the other works that intrigued me:

• Zak Ové's "A Land So Far," a transfixing video of night scenes during Trinidadian Carnival. Carnival dancers illuminated by blasts of fire from their mouths. Ritualized abandon. Painted faces and bodies. Grotesque masks. Evocative of spirits and spiritual energy, the taming of terror, crashing through to joy.

• Makandal Dada's "Birth-rite of restoration." This work portrays a totemic figure fashioned out of nails and animal horns protruding from fabric. It fairly bristles with anger - a porcupine, armored and defensive, warning one not to touch.

• The Rickards Brothers' (Peter Dean and Peter John Rickards) short video "Proverbs 24:10," in which footage of a couple of dancers undulating to an outdoor sound system is slowed down. The mournful recording of "All Things Beautiful" by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is substituted for the original soundtrack of pounding dancehall music. The work has a deeply elegiac feel.

• Sheena Rose's "Town," a short video of a young woman going about her daily business in Barbados created from a conversation of touched-up photos, line drawings and text.

• Adele Todd's "Police an' Tief." Todd's embroidery on linen depicts scenes of police, arrests, victims of violence crying. The folk art simplicity of the harsh subject matter is particularly affecting.

Rockstone & Bootheel is up through March 14, enough time to see it twice. Or more.

Contemporary West Indies art show opens Saturday at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art
Nov. 14, 2009—March 14, 2010.
Opening reception: Sat., Nov. 14, 3—6 p.m.

Press release

Real Art Ways presents some of the most challenging, recent work by artists from the Anglophone Caribbean and the diaspora in Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art, curated by Kristina Newman-Scott and Yona Backer. The exhibition, featuring the works of 39 artists, evokes the feeling of a high-energy "mash up." The works are juxtaposed in conversation with each other to reveal complex, fragmented stories about contemporary Anglophone Caribbean culture, challenging common assumptions about West Indian artistic expression.

Rockstone and Bootheel opens on Sat., Nov. 14 and runs through Sun., March 14, 2010. The opening reception is on Sat., Nov. 14, 3—6 p.m. Performances at the reception include Christopher Cozier's temporary sound installation, Sound System, and a performance by Zachary Fabri.

Public programs slated to take place during the run of the show include film screenings, readings, performances, live music, artist talks, lectures, and community based activities. An event schedule will be available online closer to the exhibition's opening date.

About Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art:

The exhibition's name comes from a Jamaican dub-metal song, "Rockstone and Bootheel," by Gibby. It's a colloquial phrase that means "taking a journey." Rockstone and Bootheel is, in fact, an exhibition composed of many journeys, sometimes conflicting, all influenced by the social, political, and economic conditions of life in the West Indies and the diaspora. "West Indies" refers to a group of islands in the Caribbean formerly under British control.

The exhibition focuses on artists from the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago, all former British colonies, each with a distinct artistic presence.

Rockstone and Bootheel offers a snapshot of recent works that draw from the region's popular culture and history. Rather than make the case for a particular West Indian aesthetic, the exhibition offers a lively glimpse into contemporary Anglophone Caribbean visual practice - an energetic "mash up" of art that lies at the intersection of popular and urban culture.

Music and dance are pervasive in West Indian culture. Many of the works in Rockstone and Bootheel incorporate sound and performative elements, drawing from Carnival, Jamaican Dancehall, and other dominant subcultures.

The works also tell stories of the region's complicated history, a history filled with conflict, transformation, and cross-cultural exchange. Through their work, the artists address issues including gender, race, sexuality and homophobia, and the rampant crime and violence plaguing many of the islands' inner cities.

The exhibition features large-scale installations, new media and multi-disciplinary works, digital projections, music videos and large-format photographs. Also featured are assemblage sculptures, paintings, and live performances.

An offsite public art project by Karyn Olivier will be installed at a West Indian grocery store in Hartford. Hartford, Connecticut has the third largest West Indian population in the United States, after New York and Miami.

The exhibition's 39 participating artists are Akuzuru, Ewan Atkinson, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Renee Cox, Christopher Cozier, Blue Curry, Sonya Clark, Makandal Dada, Annalee Davis, Khalil Deane, Zachary Fabri, Joscelyn Gardner, Marlon Griffith, Satch Hoyt, Christopher Irons, Leasho Johnson, Ras Kassa, Jayson Keeling, O'Neil Lawrence, Christina Leslie, Simone Leigh, Jaime Lee Loy, Dave McKenzie, Wendell McShine, Petrona Morrison, Karyn Olivier, Zak Ové, Ebony G. Patterson, Omari Ra, Peter Dean Rickards, Nadine Robinson, Sheena Rose, Oneika Russell, Heino Schmid, Phillip Thomas, Adele Todd, Nari Ward, Jay Will and Dave Williams.

Richard Rawlins will create an interactive website and catalog for the exhibition's international audience. Rawlins is artistic director for CMB Creative and the founder of the online magazine Draconian Switch. Like Draconian Switch, the catalog will also feature creative work by designers working in advertising. Contributing writers to the catalog include Garnette Cadogan; Nicholas Laughlin (editor of the Caribbean Review of Books); writers and critics Annie Paul and Melanie Archer; Donna P. Hope, a professor of Dancehall Culture and Reggae Studies; and poet/activist Muhammad Muwakil.

The Curators:

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Real Art Ways' Director of Visual Arts Kristina Newman-Scott is a practicing artist. Newman-Scott has organized and curated exhibitions with a particular focus on presenting emerging artists in innovative ways. Her previous curatorial projects include Shadow Show, Archaeology of Wonder and Real Public.

Yona Backer is a co-founder of Third Streaming, a project where popular culture, contemporary art, film, fashion and design intersect. Previously, she served as the Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society in New York and most recently as the Senior Program Officer at the Andy Warhol Foundation. Yona Backer was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Lamson exhibit opens at Artspace Thursday

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
William Lamson: Time Is Like the East River
Nov. 12—Dec. 19, 2009
Public Opening: Thurs., Nov. 12, 6—8 p.m.

Press release

Artspace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn artist William Lamson. Frequently engaging with elemental forces such as gravity, wind, and tides, Lamson uses the time-bound mediums of performance and video to explore the limitations of human control and the material nature of time. This show marks the first occasion that Artspace has turned over the entirety of the gallery space to an individual artist.

In his new video, Time is Like the East River, Lamson takes New York's East River as his subject matter, addressing the transitions that occur with the crossing of thresholds and boundaries. The video opens with Lamson and a friend paddling two small boats toward each other from opposite sides of a broad body of water. Upon meeting in the middle, the boats link together, revealing that each boat was in fact half of a seventeen-foot canoe. As the two paddle into the distance, the camera (located on the Manhattan Bridge) slowly zooms out, revealing a radiant Manhattan skyline. Shot at slack tide, the moments between the change in direction of tidal currents, the normally turbulent river appears as calm a lake. Only in this transitional state, when the river changes directions and time is seemingly arrested, is Lamson's passage possible. The artist's homemade props and artifacts from the performance will also be on view in the gallery.

In conjunction with this video, the exhibition features two new site-specific works including a 40-foot wall drawing that evokes a theoretical timeline. The drawing is made from fuses and firecrackers, materials that both signify singular moments and lengths of time. Lamson subverts the traditional timeline progression, creating the drawing by lighting the fuse from both ends. In the adjacent room, a similar record of an event remains in the form of a series of lines of video tape stretched tight between arrows shot into opposing walls. At the end of the room, a sculpture consisting of two bows mounted in opposite directions hint at the unseen performance behind the installation. Experimental in nature, these performative works address the measurement of time and make manifest the liminal space between opposing forces.

William Lamson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited nationally and internationally; his work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art, among numerous private collections.

Tinkering with technological concepts

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
The Weekend Inventor
Through Oct. 31, 2009
Artist Talk and Film Screening: Thurs., Oct. 15, 6 p.m.

Not all creative thinking is created equal. Or, to put it another way, not all creative thinking runs in the same direction.

Consider technology. For most of us, the products of engineering and science are considered through in terms of their specific uses: What does this do and how well does it do it? This is in part a function of capitalism. The process of production (and creation) is submerged by commodity fetishism. The object is a miracle (and the system that creates it is miraculous). Production is hidden (a useful thing when that production occurs, as it so often does, on the backs of exploited workers).

Still, behind the products, devices, systems of our contemporary plugged-in world lie a billion acts of creativity. Creativity in design and problem-solving. Millennial breakthroughs and incremental advances. So it is in art, the creative path judged less on use value—although exchange value certainly plays a huge role—and more by criteria such as aesthetics, and philosophical and intellectual content.

These worlds aren't mutually exclusive, of course. An Apple computer, a Louis Kahn building or a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk have aesthetic appeal as well as utility. An immaculate vessel by a master potter has use value as well as visual appeal.

In a technological age it's inevitable that art should be concerned with technology and made with technological tools. The disparate artists showcased in The Weekend Inventor all share a skewed fascination with the technological act of creation, although this fascination finds different outlets. Their works mimic the act of creation for utilitarian purposes. Faux architectural designs. Homage and parody.

There's a Rube Goldberg (Web) quality to the wall-mounted mixed media installation by Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher (Web), "Sky Machine, River." The panoply of circuits, wires, junction boxes, motors, lights and miniature camera are connected to a large flat screen TV terminal and a pair of speakers. By videotaping a miniature film set and creating a soundtrack with a computer and an automated string instrument, "Sky Machine" offers a simulated view of a river shore with dark clouds passing overhead. It's ingenious. When the sky is relatively cloudless—the clouds are created by the filming of shifting grains of sand—the music opens up, becomes almost pastoral in tone. When the clouds roll in, the synthesized orchestration, generated in computerized response to the visuals, darkens, becomes more menacing. Although technology like this has real world applications—if one considers the contemporary media environment to be part of the real world rather than its antithesis—its employment here is purely to spur an aesthetic experience.

Rube Goldberg (and Dr. Seuss [Web]) come to mind, too, when looking at Billy Malone's finely detailed ballpoint pen drawings. Drawings like "Think, Thank, Thunk" and "Werewolf" (the latter reminded me of the Dr. Seuss story "What Was I Scared Of?" about the pale green pants with nobody inside them) depict woody contraptions with no evident purpose other than to hammer boards and panels together in odd yet compelling structures. Sort of drawings of non-existent sculptures. Malone's facility with the ballpoint pen is wonderful.

Martha Lewis' elegant watercolor and gouache paintings owe a debt to architectural and engineering design drawings as well as to maps. (They also reminded me of the technological phantasmagoria contrived by 1960's comic book artists Jack Kirby [example] and Jim Steranko [example] although I doubt those artists were any influence on Lewis.) Intricate and colorful, these geometric designs are situated within an imaginary topographical map like vast power plants in the desert or mountains. In one work, "Plan B: Stirring of Melts Using Rotating and Traveling Magnetic Fields, Phase 2: The Mechanism/Flying Carpet" (the title itself an homage to scientific papers), Lewis printed out a watercolor painting on a large sheet of paper. After crumpling the print to give it a topographical illusion of its own, she suspended it with metal wires between the ceiling and the floor. A blowing fan makes the earth move, a simulated seismic rumbling.

Architecture is an obvious touchstone for artist Jane South. South's wall sculpture "Untitled (Tracing Parameters)" is made of hand-cut paper, balsa wood and acrylic paint and takes up the better part of one wall. It reminded me of the artistic views of the future often found on the covers of Popular Mechanics magazines in the 1930's and 1940's. It is a rewarding look from a wide range of angles, beautifully executed. I was able to catch Peter Sarkisian's "Extruded Video Engine #3" (Sarkisian's Web site) the night of the City-Wide Open Studios opening; unfortunately it wasn't functioning when I returned this past Saturday.

Nathan Carter's whimsical painted sculptures are made from things like backpack frames and guitar strings. They are Joan Miro-like (Web) references to communications devices such as radios and antennas. Molly Larkey's "The Scientist" (Larkey's Web site) mounts a pile of faux-finished gold bricks atop a red and black wooden i-beam base. The work alludes to contemporary science's roots in alchemy. It is an interesting concept, and one that links the inventive technological mind to the sensibility of the artist: the transfiguration of base materials into something different and more valuable.

From Artspace: This Thursday, at 6 p.m., Weekend Inventor artists Nathan Carter and Molly Larkey will provide thought-provoking insights into their creative processes. Following their discussions, artist Martha Lewis will introduce the "inventive" film The Way Things Go (1987) by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

A/V showcase at City Lights in Bridgeport Friday night

City Lights Gallery
37 Markle Ct., Bridgeport, (203) 334-7788
An Experiment in Light and Sound
Fri., Apr. 25, 8—11 p.m.

Press release

Four different projections and monitors ll over the gallery. Sangria and popcorn. BYOB, $3 donation to help the gallery. Featuring works by Dustin DeMilio, Tony Baloney, Kim Mikenis, Keith Lorraine, Dan Comboni, PeteFromAcrossTheStreet, Drake & Moesha, Simon O'Reilly, Gobler Toys, Sean Corvino, Rob Beam, gordon*, Sarah Comboni, Robert Matthew, more TBA.