During a 2005-2006 curatioral residency at Zero Station in Portland, Maine, I coordinated a total of eleven main space and project room exhibitions. Here are selected descriptions:
Main Room: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER
This group show of photography, illustration, graphic design, and “Couch Art” is a multi-media reiffication of global conflict, national identity and personal accountability and freedom. True to Zero Station’s commitment to social change, particularly around issues of the environment and natural resources, the artists assembled here are dealing with symbolic, mythological and historical aspects of public vs. private space. The work itself positions political and personal relationships to the way identity is informed and expressed by place: the homes, the cities, and the countries in which we live.
Main Room: THINGS FALL APART
New York based Sasha Bezzubov’s eye-poppingly beautiful oversize photographs both extend and subvert the current journalistic vision of humankind’s tenuous relationship to the natural landscape. Things Fall Apart was made in the aftermath of natural disasters. This project (2001-present) consists of five disasters - India after an earthquake, the Midwest after tornadoes, California after wildfires, Florida after hurricanes and Indonesia and Thailand after the tsunami.
Project Room: BEFORE
In contrast to Sasha’s work, all of the artists represented in the project room seem to be articulating a seduction with nature in its ideal form. Whether sequestered in a museum-like setting as with Jessica William’s photographs of perfect plants in pristine greenhouses (where one might go to see what plants looked liked before some world-wide apocalypse) or in the warm liquidity of black and white tones created by Edward Howell’s direct miniature contact prints, these landscape portraits cast a foreboding sense of paradise about to be lost. Dan Davis does the most to provide clues – hints of human tampering - as to possible reasons for the growing dichotomy between what the world was like and what the world has become. With a departure from the painting work that is quickly establishing her as one of the art world’s hottest tickets, New York based Angela Dufresne offers a ten minute video that collapses the intersecting planes of emotion and memory.
Project Room: NATURAL
“Beginning with such humble materials, Colin Cochran builds fragile almost ghostly images using an unorthodox mixture of techniques. Breaking all the rules regarding the layering of oil and water based media, the artist is able to develop beautiful and unexpected results that tickle the eye and seem to have been created in a partnership with nature that doesn't allow for ether participant to dominate.” (from Art & Antiques, 2003 “Reimagining the LANDSCAPE” by Edward Gomez)
J. Levesque’s tempestuous images of local youth in outdoor settings depict isolated figures gazing at the camera with eyes that are alluring and quietly sinister. Not much older than the teenagers he photographs, J. Levesque already boasts a portfolio of photography, installation, and multi-media work that bravely positions pathos and aesthetic, ontology and identification.
The materials that Michael C. McFalls incorporates into his artwork can be as ordinary as a crumpled gum wrapper lying on the grass to the myriad rocks scattered throughout his garden. With layers of intensely pigmented plaster over top of waste materials the work begins to reference geological phenomenon while at the same time other synthetic objects like candy, cake, and plastic toys. This combination of artifice and phenomenon is emblematic of the coexistence of man and the landscape.
Project Room: BROTHER TO BROTHER: A dedication to Essex Hemphill
The Academy of American Poets says...
Poet, editor, and activist Essex Hemphill was born April 16, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in Southeast Washington, DC, and began to write poems at the age of fourteen. He was educated at the University of Maryland.
Hemphill's first books were the self-published chapbooks Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). He first gained national attention when his work appeared in the anthology In the Life (1986), a seminal collection of writings by Black gay men. In 1989, his poems were featured in the award-winning documentaries Tongues Untied and Looking for Langston .
In 1991, Hemphill edited Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men , which won a Lambda Literary Award. In 1992, he released Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry , which won the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. His poems appeared in Obsidian, Black Scholar, Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, Essence , and numerous other newspapers and journals. His work also appeared in numerous anthologies including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1986) and Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS (1993). He was a visiting scholar at The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1993. On November 4, 1995, Hempill died from complications relating to AIDS.
I say...
Essex Hemphill this is to you
my brother
teach me snap queen
up awake late at night
move me through fields
metaphoric light
touching hands
heart
thigh
brother too
the mistakes
along a way
a long
way
to go
shake me
take me
you know where |