Hands Across the Water – Conditions for a Better Future
Linda Dennis
Certain Conditions
is the title of a show that came about as a result of an East Williamsburgh artist
– myself, meeting Sam Fleming, an artist from Belfast Northern Ireland, in an
internet conversation about studio exchange. His interest in reaching out to
explore opportunities for exposing his work and that of his art community seemed
interesting and we met up at the L café in Williamsburgh Brooklyn, when
he visited the city in the spring of 2002. At that point the goal had shifted
to an exchange that focused on exhibition opportunities, and we began tossing
ideas back and forth about how we might put that together. We are both artists
who concentrate on our studio practice more than curatorial efforts, but the
interest was there to try something between us that would open doors on both
sides and express our mutual interest in reaching out across the ocean.
Because we began
our efforts on a very grass routes level, their were many hurdles to overcome,
and the decision was made to have the first show in Belfast, where Sam was confident
he could secure a venue for an exhibit that included New York based artists.
Scale and focus of the exhibit became serious issues to consider, and his interest
in exhibiting three artists who work in large scale oils on canvas, made the
Waterfront Arts Center, with it’s long, high ceiling corridor gallery, the
venue of choice for his host show.
My New York group
included artists connected to Brooklyn who were both emerging, and experienced
exhibitors with Museum and Gallery shows to their credit. The show was about
exchange on a very fundamental level – a desire to find common ground regardless
of locale and cultural roots, so artists were selected who’s work related
to the idea that given conditions affect the creative process in a way that reveals
the common issues of humanity everywhere. Each of us put together artists from
our respective locations, that we felt represented something of the conditions
we ourselves shared with them in our own lives.
The Belfast group
included three painters, Ray Duncan, Louise Farrant, and Sam Fleming himself,
all of who have been active in their art community and who share studio space
and a focus on expressionistic oils on canvas. The senior member of the group,
Ray Duncan has been active in the city for years, and exhibited a triptych of
three medium sized canvases based on a bombing incident in Belfast, that was
reported in the news. Two horizontal canvases, closely placed to flank either
side of the center painting of a standing couple, each depict naked figures prone,
one a man one a woman. The simple paint handling and monochromatic color scheme
merely suggests a before and after by association, that could be an image of
the fall of Adam and Eve as much as a 20th Century tale of urban terrorism.
Both Sam Fleming
and Louise Farrant contributed large scale vertical oils on canvas that book-ended
either side of the long curving wall that faces the theatre doors of the second
floor gallery. The Belfast curator showed a big diptych that continues his interest
in altar like formal arrangements that feature translucent x-ray like figures
positioned upside down amidst of field of thinly washed blue paint interspersed
with text, symbolizing alternate realities. Louise Farrant’s single large
vertical canvas was as pink and red as Flemings was cold and blue, with generous
amounts of actively worked paint alternately covering and revealing bits and
pieces of female faces, groping hands, and text. The fleshy colors and slash-like
marks obliterate any convergence of image that would service illusion, and keep
an abstract based emphasis on her interest in the “expression of raw emotion”.
The New York group
comprised the larger number of artists, some of whom are US citizens, such as
Matt Garrison Kathryn Koos, and Linda Dennis, as well as International artists
Pan Xing Lei and Wolfgang Stiller, who are from China and Germany, but are based
in studios here. It also included Irishman George Bolster, who lives and works
in London. This exciting young artist showed a video from his One Man Demo series
that featured himself clad in a white body suit and ballyclava, brandishing a
bullhorn, and expounding on issues of violence and it’s relationship to
social structures – including the art world, with refined matter of fact decorum.
It is accompanied by a large scale digital print of the same figure in multiples
in a high tech magnesium saturated field of combatants piled atop one another,
that is a wry and witty 21st Century rendition of Liberty Guiding the People
by Eugene Delacroix.
The military imagery
and threat of violence in cultural clothing continued with striking large scale
scroll-hung digital print photos of the performance Imitate Guang Han Man by
Pan Xing Lei, hung over the stairwell above the three story drop of glass to
the lobby level. A large cardboard dagger, covered with mock digital style camouflage
using photocopies of ancient Chinese Buddhas accompanied the Crown and life size
Rifle sculptures, worn during the performance done at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts for
Asia Art Week, in New York.
As a counter weight
to the images of force and struggle, the group included small delicate Sumi Ink
drawings by Wolfgang Stiller, done on Chinese Joss paper, which is traditionally
burned for the dead. These works have been ongoing for a number of years and
have a meditative quietude that reflects their place in the creative life of
the artist – more commonly known for his elaborate installations of biomorphic
forms in laboratory settings. The soft approach continued with ethereal cotton
rope sculptures by Brooklyn native Kathryn Koos, who’s abstract forms that
depend on repetitive connections that barely hold, are informed by her experience
of life’s’ fragility as a handicapped artist.
Finally humor,
mythology, and gender roles came into play with Matt Garrison’s paper mache
stone wall, bristling with an army of colorful cocktail swords strategically
embedded behind painted newspaper boulders, awaiting only the hand the hero,
to take up the good fight. The piece was placed in a pivotal corner of the giant
Waterfront lounge with a magnificent view afforded by a wall of windows facing
the River Lagan in the center of Belfast. The relationship of merriment and violence
was all the more poignant in that spot, where only a few years ago such an edifice
of glass would not have been built because of the large scale risk it posed,
in a town still bristling with more modern weapons in impassioned hands.
And on that note,
the curator- writer completed the story with an evocation of the more magical
side of the Emerald Isle – with a large-scale homage to the 19th Century
British fascination with the supernatural mysteries of the land and it’s
wild places. Beautiful World – In the Bower, a gently ironical portrait
of the artist as a fairy amidst a flock of singing doves, celebrated the ancient
trees of the nearby Belvoir Forest with pieces of those branches woven into a
giant frame, that reached up to the skylights of the Waterfront gallery, and
out to the people of Northern Ireland, in a gesture of community and fellowship.
