Category: Review

steven locke: the color of remembering

steven locke: the color of remembering

On view through March 7th at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery 221 as part of an annual exhibition celebrating African American heritage and presented in conjunction with the Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival.

  • steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

This exhibition examines how African Americans have been depicted in ways which betrays explicit and implicit cultural prejudices depending, in this case, the age of the memory. From schematic diagrams of slave ships, historical photographs of lynchings, to modern day video, brutality and racism – institutional or otherwise – images have been made and disseminated which tacitly imply values which we should, indeed, must find deplorable.

Not only by subject matter but, significantly, it is through the means of presentation that Locke employs in the photography series Family Pictures, 2016, that he addresses how different standards apply, in particular, that there isn’t an universal sense of respect and dignity when it comes to the memorialization of the atrocious. Locke himself memorializes images of the barbaric, setting them in unexceptional frames, engraved with the platitudinous and set against strong colored backdrops – notions of remembering and color are brought to the fore – the colors are strong but it is an overall sense of banality which is most provocative and the taint on remembering which Locke communicates most powerfully.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

In Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), Locke further confronts how there remains to this day a biased filter as to presentation of the African-American experience in the media. In this case, the tragic death of Freddie Gray on April 12th, 2015 whilst in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. The intrusive and the demeaning combined with sensationalized reporting to ignore the dignity and suffering of this man. Validly, it might be asked had this not been a young African-American man whether the coverage would have taken on a different tone. By distilling the color palette of three commonly circulated photographs of Freddie Gray down to three hues of gray, Locke speaks to the debasement of this individual, his suffering and brutal death. Freddie Gray became a media-currency. His life and death had determined a value, that of a commodity. One that was exchanged between us and the news outlets. Locke shows us how we are complicit in this process, that the communication of outrage embraces complexities which have at their foundation the self same prejudices which they seek to make clear, here it is literally gray.

steven locke’s: the color of remembering at is a powerful exhibition. By bringing together the history of slavery, racism and subjugation through to the contemporaneous he threads a course of prejudices towards African Americans from the overt to the more hidden. It is instructive, in particular, how this exhibition focuses us on the modern day and practices which covertly but evidently seek to assuage the sensibilities of the mainstream at the expense of Black experience. The works themselves, are compelling and visually strong. The replication of composition in Family Pictures is one which has an unerring sense of imbalance. The images contained, framed with frames and repetitively composed powerfully suggest a diluting of content whilst, in fact, communicating the exact opposite. Steven Locke shows a consistent mastery of practice and sheer intellectual energy in working with the complexities of this difficult but very important subject matter. To be asked to re-think, indeed, re-remember and to give life and color to the challenging is the significant and worthy success of this exhibition.

At Bay Art Files, we have asked Tyra Mishell, who is pursuing a BA in Studio Art at the University of South Florida, to write about this powerful and timely exhibition. Her impressions of viewing the exhibition and meeting with the artist will post soon.

Light Through Her Hands: Patricia Cronin at the Tampa Museum of Art

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Eleanor Eichenbaum

Artist Patricia Cronin’s “Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity” is the inaugural exhibition in the Tampa Museum’s Conversations with the Collection, which puts contemporary art in dialogue with classical antiquities. The exhibit fills two large galleries and the outdoor terrace on the Museum’s second floor. Cronin, a widely recognized Brooklyn-based artist, offers a show that is thoughtful, feminist, materially dazzling, and asks dimensional questions of the fragment and the whole.

The exhibition features three main series of works, all of which engage materially and conceptually. The works feature tactile media; from stone to glass to blue painter’s tarps, to create a densely layered experience. The works echo with female multiplicity— the woman as artist, the woman as symbol, the woman as present, the woman as absent. Cronin interrogates what is missing – in the history of women, of women artists, and in physical reality. Sculptures may be partial, paintings may contain traces, negative space may be charged.

Walking through the exhibition, a viewer threads connections between thoughts and works. Seams – flickering lines of betweenness— are integral to the character of the show. Cronin’s works hinge on the possibility of questions made visible, of touching the ephemeral through noticing the absent.

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The gallery closest to the stairs, where the visitor arrives, features works from the Aphrodite Reimagined series. Cronin’s mastery of material choices resonates in this cool bluish room where the sculptural pieces converse with the layered works on the walls. Large paintings with gossamer transparencies depict outlines of individual Aphrodite sculptures from various museum collections. The paintings show the different presences of these particular Aphrodites; the form of the sculptural body is featured in relief, the background rendered as an aqueous field. Viewing these many traces of Aphrodites, a viewer may consider multiplicities in Aphrodite’s symbolic identities and in the histories of these sculptures. Cronin’s paintings are soft and illuminate the ineffable space between line and body. These works conjure what is ghostly, what is fluid— a seam of the permeable that runs through the show.

Of particular interest is Cronin’s Aphrodite (Metropolitan Museum): a two-part sculpture made of deep green cast glass displayed on a pedestal, its two halves set apart by a cushion of space. This piece is Cronin’s first work in cast glass and displays the sculptural body as impression. The seam, a site of joining to create a potential whole, is rendered visible here through the two halves that the viewer may work to visually assemble. In addition to its watery translucence, the apt material choice holds the moment the molten glass stills. This quiet interrogation of the momentary resonates in the exhibition.

Cronin’s moving Memorial to a Marriage and works that focus on the 19th-century American female sculptor Harriet Hosmer share the next large gallery. These works amplify questions of presence and absence. Memorial to a Marriage is functional as an iteration of memorial sculpture in Woodlawn Cemetery for Cronin and her wife, the artist Deborah Kass. They are depicted in marble, asleep and embracing under folds of sheets. The sculpture witnesses the connected lives of two female artists and holds both tenderness and contemplative melancholy. The creamy stone is perhaps the exhibition’s most taut moment of absence, as it materializes questions of mortality. Memorial to a Marriage was initially created in 2002 and predates the legalization of gay marriage by the United States Supreme Court by thirteen years. Another kind of booming absence – one of equality.

Through the project Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonne, Cronin illuminates Hosmer’s work and asks that the viewer see the artist’s works that have been lost to history. Cronin renders these lost works as watery shimmering outlines on paper and as towering abstractions on fabric – revealing each as a glance, a shadow, a ghost. The threads of what was lost are realized in two monumental wall-mounted silk pieces: Queen of Naples and Ghost. The fabric cascades far above the viewer’s height and the air in the gallery animate these pieces with slight billows. The works are both subtle and imposing, like an urgent but hazy memory or like blinking in a dark room trying to find her.


Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files
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Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The her that the viewer ultimately finds is Cronin’s outdoor sculpture, Aphrodite Reimagined. She towers above the viewer and dialogues with light and landscape, her face towards the Hillsborough River. The piece, a whole composite Aphrodite, was inspired by a fragmentary 1st-century AD sculpture in the Museum’s classical antiquities collection. In fact, the viewer may encounter the ancient marble torso on display in the gallery, before proceeding to the terrace. This impression of the fragmentary flashes and is enforced in Cronin’s monumental, Aphrodite Reimagined. Strikingly, her legs, feet, arms, hands, and head are translucent resin, pale green and watery while the draped torso is gray and fixed in stone. Outside, these glassy hands catch light. Light slips through them – a prismatic recasting of stubborn histories. Hands, the means by which we count, gesture, touch, and hold are rendered physically anew from a material that mimics absence and calls attention to what we can now see.

Eleanor Eichenbaum is a writer and educator based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is also an independent curator of visual arts and has organized exhibits in New York, New Jersey, and California.

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through March 17, 2019.
For more information, visit the museum’s website at tampamuseum.org.

We can selfie if we want to

Snapchat photo by Sabrina Hughes, the author of the upcoming post titled: My Camera, My Sel(fie) using Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, Cortina, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The upcoming essay by St. Petersburg photo historian Sabrina Hughes, My Camera My Self(ie), which will post on Bay Art Files next week, examines the complex relationship between photographic self-portraiture and the selfie. That such a relationship might exist and be scrutinized is explicitly suggested by the title of the current traveling exhibition at the MFA, St Petersburg, This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self- Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. The title asserts that a clear distinction can be drawn between the two.

The Irmas Collection, on display at the MFA through November 25th, is a deep and rich survey of photographic self-portraiture by considerable artists and is, as such, definitely worthy of one’s time and attention and a visit. In conjunction with the exhibition there are also selfie stations situated in the galleries where one can photograph oneself with various backdrops; projected, optical and otherwise. To take the exhibition’s title at face value, as it were, we are being asked to make a comparison between the art on the walls and the selfie one might take whilst at the exhibition.

Undoubtedly, this is a complex and involved question. The fact that a comparison is being asked to be drawn, in itself, entertains the notion that there is a spectrum on which both can be assessed. There are commonalities between museum-quality photographic self-portraiture and the selfie, and that these two distinct practices should be fairly judged and reviewed one and together, at the same time, and in the same place is surely a provocative question.

It is one that Hughes insightfully and deftly examines in her Essay, My Camera, My Self(ie).  Alone, the artists and their works on display definitely deserve one’s time and attention. The issues raised in the essay, it is hoped, will add a further perspective that provokes thought and encourages discourse. And indeed, in addition, add to one’s overall enjoyment of this exhibition. That is our intention.

 

Disturbed by Delight – Caitlin Albritton

Disturbed by Delight

by Caitlin Albritton

“Woman dressed as a turkey arrested for shoplifting,” “Someone donated a loaded grenade launcher to Goodwill,” “Man claims wife was kidnapped by holograms”—please, don’t let this be a headline from Florida, a local might plead. I can’t begin to imagine how non-Floridians make sense of the Sunshine State: how can so many bizarre stories come out of a place so seemingly utopic? While this handle of land has been distilled into a variety of assumptions, Florida native Selina Román uses photography to usurp these presumptions by reveling in its beauty and strangeness in her solo exhibition A Liminal State at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art. While her exhibition encompasses five bodies of work, most of her solo show revolves around the Please Disturb series and the related Please Disturb: LRMA Edition.

Travel has always been a way to understand a place. In the heyday of road trips in the first few decades of the 20thcentury, the popularity of the automobile lifted the boundaries of economic status and permitted an escape from the everyday. What a better way to welcome Florida-bound tourists than with family-run motels that offer dreams of relaxing seas and palm tree paradise. Yet with contemporary travel, it’s no longer about the journey but getting to the destination as quickly as possible. Travel has lost its spark, while forgotten motels now serve as an embodied representation of Florida—with its own fantasies and unfulfilled dreams. Swaddled in a potentially unwashed comforter, this state encapsulates everything weird, sexy, funny, and mysterious about this peninsula.

So, let’s linger in these transient spaces a bit longer.

“What would happen if I brought a readymade to a motel?” I’d like to think this is how Román decided to turn dated Florida motel rooms into her temporary studio space for her Please Disturb series, inviting her friends and other guests in for intimate photoshoots full of vintage props and 80s beauty products: tasseled majorette uniforms, frilly swimming caps adorned with silk rosettes, and facial treatment masks, all haloed by a barrage of sequins that glitz like fish scales in the sultry lighting. The commissioned LRMA Edition is just as bedazzled, but instead of photographing people she knew, this was the first-time strangers—museum docents and members— had been invited to her room at the Tarpon Shores Inn.

Alter egos arise under the cover of costume.

There’s a bit of improvisation and performance on Román’s part in setting up these rooms, from the careful arrangement of costumes in open-plan closets to the posing of her models; there may be some ideas in mind, but for-the-most-part, all parties involved allow fluidity in the process. Instead of chastising our inherent interest in gazing at others, Roman’s admission of our society’s voyeuristic tendencies whispers to us: don’t mind if you do.

While motels are often the sites of her photographs, other innately Floridaesque locations insinuate the condition of transformation: beaches, fresh-water springs, or abandoned public pools as evidenced in the other series on display.

Ebb Tide, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist

What makes her photographs alluring is the fact that they resist direct eye contact; if our eyes are windows to the soul, most of Román’s are coyly shuttered (even the motel’s street-front signage is bashful, its watery reflection mirrored via pool in Ebb Tide). In 15thcentury Italian paintings, many painters would rely on the viewer’s disposition to read into relationships within the work. In a poetic treatise on painting by the artist-philosopher Leon Battista Alberti, he says, “Movements of the soul are recognized in movements of the body.” Searching for emotional keys in body language and relationships between the figures and their flirtatious props (as well as cheeky titles), Román mixes the familiar with the foreign to create moments of captivating uncanny.

Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? 2012. Archival transparency print in a lightbox, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In looking for what questions Román’s work asks of us, I found one in the title of one of her pieces: Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? an inkjet transparency lit from behind to create a soft blue glow in the background. A woman’s curvaceous silhouette lounges in waiting: a fishnet shirt is stretched over the morsel of breast we can fathom from our view behind her. Her short red wig glows from another light source, and we can make out the porous plastic material that makes up the wig’s artificial lining, not even trying to create a perfect camouflage of her natural hair that peeks out beneath it. After a while, you’ll notice it: the sliver of hairy chest she is leaning upon.

Low-Grade Euphoria, 2013. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

It feels too easy to say that, “Fantasy is better!” since each figure is wrapped up in their own alternate universe that escapes the dregs of real life. Either way, Román seems unwilling to show her cards on which she believes is “better,” equally considering both sides. Hints to this lie in how the perfect image of fantasy is disrupted in her iconic photos, from the awkwardness of a bathing-suit-clad body stuffed through a pool chair like in Low-Grade Euphoria, to the absurdity of wearing silicone lips that promise to make your jawline slenderer and more appealing, seen in Maybe She’s Born With It.

Maybe She’s Born With It, 2017. Archival inkjet print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

 Glitter is good at hiding disheveled, grubby spaces, is it not?

So, perhaps the answer Román is getting at is that reality impedes imagination. Another rift in the fantasy comes from the prop vignettes throughout the exhibition. The solidity of these props grounds the viewer—Oh, this is what it really is! —slightly shattering the ephemerality of the images by gently steeping them in reality.

In a contemporary art scene where “meaning” feels prized over aesthetics, it seems that Román is also asking how uncanny or unconsidered beauty can be used purposefully to balance the weighted scales of daily burdens. How does the old Hollywood glamour in her LRMA Edition of Please Disturb empathetically portray the sensuality of an aging woman? How can we simmer in the magnificence of nostalgia without agonizing over the past? How can we celebrate and create an identity for transience by shedding a new light on all of the stuff we didn’t know we should be considering as instigators of awe and wonder?

For those who have yet to put their finger on the pulse of what makes this state tick, Roman’s provocative works are like being baptized in the heavily chlorinated waters of Floridian mythology: there’s an element of folklore that reaches towards the fantastic, yet is firmly rooted in reality. Deeply mysterious, it’s the kind of artwork that quivers the stillness of the imagination in an age of excessive data that tries to stifle it.

I am content in being a voyeur in these calm, intimate moments, where I am disturbed by delight.

 

Caitlin Albritton is an artist and freelance writer based in Tampa with a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. When she’s not looking at art throughout town, she can be found making it. You can keep up with her visual art on Instagram @caitlinalbritton or on her website.

In partnership with Smithsonian Museum Day where participating museums (such as the Leepa-Rattner) will have free admission, the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art will be hosting the event Concealed: A Photoshoot with Selina Románfrom 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on September 22, 2018,  for the last weekend of A Liminal State, which will be up through September 23rd. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own props and will have the opportunity to have a Polaroid of themselves to bring back home.