Theme Exploration - Sounding Off: Southern Present
By Co-Curator Eleanor Heartney, on display at TRAX Visual Art Center at 122 Sauls Street, Lake City, SC
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Charles Dickens summation of the late 18th century might serve as an epigraph for our own time as well. The 21st century has presented us with complicated realities that pull in opposite directions. Revolutions in technology point toward tantalizing new possibilities: artificial intelligence that could free us from mundane and soul destroying tasks, new forms of renewable energy that could detach us from a climate-destroying dependence on fossil fuels, new forms of communication that make limitations of space and time meaningless. But at the same time we have not been able to transcend some of the oldest human failings. War, greed, fear and distrust still shape far too many of our interactions with each other and with the world.
Delving into our contemporary realities, the artists consider such pressing issues as climate change, violence, trauma, inequities of power and wealth and the ever more fraught nature of truth. But because they are artists, they eschew didactic or journalistic modes of presentation. Instead they confront the world with wit, metaphor, irony and symbolism. They invite us, the viewers, to feel and experience the complexities of the dilemmas that face us. They reveal how art can serve as witness, expose hypocrisy and contradiction, foster empathy and point to more life enhancing possibilities than those that are currently on offer.
What is Southern about this work? The problems explored here are not limited to any one region or place. However, these artists use their grounding in the South to underscore the way that issues touch real people and are born of specific circumstances in real places. They are storytellers who help us feel and understand the world around us.
Thus, for instance, when artists express environmental concerns, they provide vivid images and representations that dramatize the precarity of humankind’s current relationship with nature. Fiber artist Marian Zielinski has been inspired by the ambiguous history and checkered beauty of Georgia’s Providence Canyon State Park. Sometimes described as “Georgia’s Grand Canyon”, this dramatic landscape of massive sandstone gullies was formed by erosion precipitated by farm run-off in the 19th century. Today it is a popular hiking spot, but has also served as a dumping ground for old automobiles whose rusty carcasses are being reshaped by the elements. Zielinski’s stunning Providence Canyon quilts suggest the ironies of this interplay of nature and culture. Her compositions are realized in fiber from pieced together digital images of landscape, cars, and water. She presents an environment reshaped by poor agricultural practices and she pictures vehicles being reclaimed by nature. These present flip sides of our interactions with nature. Such works reveal that it is no longer possible to separate humanity from its effect on the surrounding world.
The work of Hannah Chelew is also rooted in a specific place, in her case Southern Louisiana where she lives and works. Her work is based on meticulous research into the politics and environmental repercussions of fossil fuel extraction and plastic production in her state. Cognizant of the damage that even artists may do, she minimizes her impact with natural and recycled materials that combine sugarcane with shredded plastic disposable waste. Feedback LOOP presents a visual metaphor for the struggle between nature and the fossil fuel industry as it plays out under the auspices of LOOP, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port. LOOP is a deepwater port outside Baton Rouge which provides tanker offloading and temporary storage services for crude oil. Here Chelew presents an image of a tree toppled during Hurricane Ida whose roots are metamorphizing into the pipelines that transport oil through the wetlands of Southern Louisiana. Through this strange image, we become aware of the ways that industry is remaking nature in its own image.
Loren Schwerd also creates objects that suggest the interweavings of nature and culture. The small sculptures here are from a series titled Confluence. They are inspired by bits of plastic debris which traveled the ocean and landed on the Oregon coast following the 2011 Japanese Tsunami. Schwerd found them oddly affecting and was struck by the power of nature to reshape human discards into things of beauty. These works pay homage to that unwitting collaboration between nature and humans. They incorporate natural materials and found objects and evoke such human activities as weaving, net making, basketry and needle lace. In the process they ask us to reconsider what we mean by creativity and beauty and urge us to appreciate the artistry of nature itself.
Nik Botkin and Kirkland Smith explore the transformation of discards to other ends. Smith draws attention to the American penchant for disposability and waste. An economy based on consumption has created a crisis in waste management as landfills overflow, islands of discarded plastic clog the ocean and mountains of electronic waste contaminate our land and water. Smith collects these materials and uses them to create iconic images that confront us with our feckless behavior. Disposable America presents an American flag composed of bottle tops and plastic toys, including a number of carefully placed toy airplanes that subtly point to our military obsessions. The Crying Indian is based on a ubiquitous public relations campaign from the artist’s childhood that used the image of a Native American (actually an actor of Italian descent) to decry the despoiling of the landscape with trash. As Kirkland points out, this campaign was actually financed by the Ad Council to divert responsibility for bottle and packaging waste from manufacturers and onto individual consumers. Like Disposable America she has created this image from recycled waste. From a distance Disposable America and The Crying Indian resemble mosaic compositions but up close one is able to discern the individual elements. These works suggest that what we throw away tells as much about us as what we keep.
Nik Botkin also constructs works out of found objects, but his target is the connection between industrialization and the extinction of native animal species. As he points out, we are in the midst of what has been termed the sixth mass extinction. While there have been mass die-offs of species before, this is the first one driven by human activity and it is accelerating at alarming speed. Botkin directs our attention to the beauty of what may be lost with a series of animal sculptures created from kitchen flatware. Forks, knives and spoons become feathers and fur. These remarkably lifelike and lifesize creatures represent both predators and prey. They are made up of thousands of pieces of metal whose previous life as implements of consumption disappear into likenesses of our fellow creatures.
Other artists turn their attention to questions of power and control. These are issues of particular interest to MyLoan Dinh who escaped with her family to this country from her native Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War. She was four years old at the time and her early childhood is filled with memories of the struggle to survive and fit into her new country. This has given her an immigrant’s perspective on questions of freedom and equality. She creates symbols of power out of delicate, fragile materials. A punching bag covered with eggs shells and emblazoned with the word Truth suggests the fragility of that concept in our current political battles. Boxing gloves covered with clay copies of pastel candy hearts drain the aggression from this combative symbol. With such works Dinh exploits the dissonance between object and material to question our assumptions about masculinity and femininity, strength and weakness, inside and outside.
Antonio Darden draws from pop culture to suggest the ways that American society subtly reshapes its citizens’ sense of self. Darden grew up in North Carolina. As the child of a West Indian mother and African American Father, he was painfully aware of his difference from those around him. His work makes reference to media messages about the superiority of whiteness, the normalizing of police violence and the inherent criminality of Black men. He leavens his messages with humor, as when he presents an image of Carl Carlson, the recurring Black character on the Simpsons, as he reacts in horror to the world around him. In another work he reinvents the number 666 as a trio of shrimp dripping with blood red cocktail sauce, thereby melding the figure’s apocalyptic symbolism as the mark of the beast with its use as a cry of defiance against police brutality by the Rapper KRS One.
Kristi Ryba also uses humor to satirize government corruption and the gutting of America’s ideals. Her paintings, which involve the application of 22K gold leaf and egg tempera onto wooden panels, approximate the look of late Medieval and early Renaissance altarpieces and manuscripts. However, in these works, religious symbolism becomes a medium through which to explore the construction and abuse of power. She places figures familiar from the news into scenarios that echo morality plays and allegories of good and evil common in those earlier ages. Actual quotations attributed to these characters, presented as inscriptions in gothic script, undermine the lofty idealism suggested by the tableaux and instead underscore the very unChristian attitudes and pretensions of their protagonists. In the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration, Ryba offers an elaborate altar installation that deftly skewers the trappings of imperialism, the sycophancy and hypocrisy of members of the court and deification of the leader during the Trump administration.
Words are a medium in the work of Kate Burke. Burke is interested in technology’s impact on consciousness. She brings together two apparently antithetical means of communication, presenting words and simple phrases realized in thread and embroidery but hanging in the air like bits of digital code adrift in cyberspace. The tension between embroidery, so material, labor intensive and deeply analog, and pixilated, digital text underscores the in-between place where our thoughts and emotions now seem to exist. The phrases she memorializes here are equally ambiguous. Just watched, realized in white and off white thread, seems itself on the verge of dematerializing - suggesting the way that images, words and thoughts appear and immediately slip away on the screen. Happy for you, which might be a straightforward expression of empathy, is also the title of a song by Lukas Graham which in fact suggests quite the opposite emotion. Here the words of the phrase are disintegrating before our eyes, turning this conventional expression into a meaningless tangle of letters.
The play of presence and absence also informs Garrett Hansen’s explorations of America’s penchant for gun violence. His Silhouette Series are memorials to the victims of the individual and mass shootings that are an ever more pervasive aspect of contemporary life. To create these works, he gathers cardboard backings from shooting ranges. While the targets, which are based on an abstracted human form, are constantly changed, the backings are not. The holes in the targets become records of all the individual shots that tear into them. As is clear here, these tend to be concentrated around the head and chest areas. Hansen makes prints of the bullet riddled cardboards and replicates them in mirrored plexiglass. Set up in the gallery like funhouse mirrors, they present the viewer with unsettling reflections. Uniting the audience with the void created by the bullets, he makes viewers aware of the emptiness left behind with each needless death.
Becky Alley is also a memorial maker, and her work has frequently focused on the victims of war. She
creates installations out of craft materials and ordinary objects, including large accumulations of elements like soap, matches, felt, yarn, leaves and pins. The simple, domestic nature of these articles stands in deliberate contrast to the hard and indestructible kinds of materials out of which such monuments are normally made. Soft Armor is a reminder that war is not the only battlefront for many people. The work was inspired by a neighbor who was a victim of domestic violence. A bunker of pillows hardened by plaster suggests how home can be a war zone. As with her other memorials, the accumulation of elements offers mute testimony to the magnitude of the problem.
Noelle Mason also uses soft, homey materials to humanize the horror of shocking acts of violence. Love Letter evokes the act of mourning by recording fragments of pages from the journals of Columbine High School shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris on vintage handkerchiefs. While some of these allude to the pair’s motives and plans, others are disorientingly ordinary, consisting of things like school assignments, lists of girl’s names and to-do lists. The inclusion of these kinds of texts, along with their presentation in a stereotypically feminine format, complicates the media image of the two as inhuman monsters. Instead one is drawn to contemplate the role of distorted ideals of masculinity, America’s gun culture, and the normalizing of violence in news and entertainment in these kinds of tragedies. In the end the use of embroidery feels like a kind of salve, as if the thread and stitches are literal efforts to bind up the wounds that mass shootings leave in their wake.
Sounding Off reveals some of the ways that artists are grappling with the complexities of life today. Through the stories they tell, art provides a new perspective, a solace and a spur to action.