Colin Quashie’s recently completed mural, entitled Service, focuses on the intricacy of interactions between art and politics in a complex, expressive artwork commissioned by the University of North Carolina’s School of Government. Noted as a controversial artist, Quashie, based in Charleston, South Carolina, undertook the completion of this project sustained by the patronage of the Local Government Federal Credit Union. The painting commemorates the contributions of African Americans to North Carolina’s local history, and addresses omissions from popular cultural memory. The circumstances of this image, and its commission offer a rich opportunity for social commentary and a dialogue on culture, race, reasoning, community, and the aesthetics of public memorials in America.

Although Service is presented as a traditional mural painting, its placement, combined with the artist’s contrived design motifs and the mural’s contextual cultural inferences, morphs the work’s significance away from being a “history painting” into a nexus of relevant political issues. Approximately 5’ high and 50’ long, the figures represented are rendered in thin, translucent oil glazes. Despite its concessions to the conventions of naturalistic figurative art, this work’s conceptual richness and informative, amusing, complexity make it more than a simple mural; it is a “conversation piece” in the very best sense of that term.

The ideas suggested in this work obliquely confront visitors to the ground floor dining room of the Knapp-Sanders Building on the Chapel Hill campus. Operating more like a satirically conceived installation rather than the simple mural, it coyly seeks to pacify us with a history painting, yet its complex ideas correspond with the socially critical and ironic implications associated with other works by Quashie, whose rambunctious contentions with our American culture often simultaneously entertain while interrogating the presumed motivations and assumptions of his audiences. Quashie seduces us into believing that this image is “safe” and the mural seems initially to offer few surprises: that is to say, it does the work that it was expected to do by representing a series of figures of historic significance. Service, however deals with more than simple appearances.

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Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo create objects that are visually captivating and conceptually charged. Cave’s imaginative Soundsuits and Galembo’s photographic portraits of West African masqueraders prompt the viewer to regard the world in terms of connection and community.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Upon entering the Halsey, one is struck by the mystical presence of Cave’s Soundsuits. Cave, a former dancer and current Chair of the Fashion Design Department at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, combines his experience in modern dance with his expertise in fiber textiles to create his Soundsuits. The first soundsuit was constructed entirely of gathered twigs, resulting in a subtle rustling sound when worn; thus, the name. The kaleidoscopic costumes reference the ritualistic garments worn by Galembo’s subjects, the people of Africa whom she has spent decades photographing. Cave’s sculptures, anthropomorphic assemblages of materials such as dyed human hair, plastic buttons, beads, sisal, sequins, fabrics, feathers, and other natural ephemera, are layered with personal and cultural associations. The disparate materials are masterfully woven together by the artist, ornamental embellishments create undeniable tactile and visual appeal for the viewer; the soundsuits incite a collective sense of awe.

In the adjacent gallery, Phyllis Galembo’s photographic portraits chronicle masqueraders from various West African countries, including Benin, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. The masquerade is a meaningful mode of cultural expression for several African groups, and Galembo presents a straightforward observation of individuals within particular cultures. Galembo’s work is a field study on these regions, a modern documentation of their ancient ceremonial traditions. Disguised as animals, spirits, or ancestors, her subjects enact ancient legends and stories, but the artist captures them in stasis. Galembo, described as a “photographic hunter-gatherer” by writer Emma Reeves, incorporates her subjects’ natural surroundings in detailed compositions that highlight the garments, the accoutrements (i.e. a staff to connote authority), and the occasional glimpse of a bare, or sneakered, foot of a masquerader. Galembo elegantly achieves a personal encounter with a masked individual, and successfully conveys this engagement to the remote viewer.

Courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Call and Response: Africa to America will remain on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art until June 26th. The exhibition is taking place during Spoleto Festival USA, an annual performing arts event held in Charleston, SC every spring. The Halsey’s sincere presentation of Cave’s soundsuits and Galembo’s photographs offer an exciting visual arts alternative to the citywide performing arts festival.

Alema Rose, Aler IDP camp, Uganda, Heather McClintock, 2006

The College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art presents a photographic exhibition that pairs Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape and Heather McClintock’s The Innocents:  Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda.  Torgovnik and McClintock’s respective photographic series address specific African humanitarian crises through capturing a selection of survivors in photographic portrait.

Valerie with her Son Robert © Jonathan Torgovnik

Jonathan Torgovnik’s series Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape addresses the aftermath of the humanitarian crisis in which more than 100,000 women were sexually assaulted by the Hutu militia during the 1994 Rwandan genocide that saw the massacre of over 800,000 Tutsis.  All of the photographic portraits on display feature a survivor with her children.  Torgovnik chose to pair each photograph with a text panel that relates each woman’s statements about her personal journey.  The highly intimate photographs present resilient women coping with raising children conceived by rape, the possibility of HIV infection and with the stigma they face within their communities.  A video featuring interviews with these women accompanies the photographs.

Abalo Joyce, Lacor Hospital, Gulu Uganda, Heather McClintock, 2006

Heather McClintock’s The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda presents the physical impact of Uganda’s conflict from a personal perspective.  Since the 1980s the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has rebelled against the Ugandan government, resulting in the death of thousands and the uprooting of millions into displacement camps.  Women and children have been acutely affected by the violence;  thousands of children have been abducted and enslaved as sex slaves, porters and soldiers.  McClintock’s photographic portraits result from the artist’s almost year-long stay in Uganda and her efforts to document the suffering of the Acholi tribe.  The portraits are accompanied by text panels largely filled with the artist’s own words.  McClintock’s quiet and personal images capture individual Northern Ugandans’ suffering and struggle to survive.

Valentine with her daughters Amelie and Inez © Jonathan Torgovnik

Torgovnik and McClintock have created photographic portraits defined by highly emotive compositions and rich colors.  The portraits successfully depict the personal impact of warfare and the artists are to be commended for their efforts to bring attention to humanitarian crises.  However, the emphasis upon individual stories of victimization does not do justice to the complexities of the Rwandan genocide or the Civil War in Northern Uganda.  The photographs themselves lack pedagogic content, which is instead derived solely from wall text that only roughly outlines the conflicts while also largely focusing on the personal.

Torgovnik received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.  He is a cofounder of Foundation Rwanda and presently serves on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in New York.  McClintock received her B.A. from New England College.  Both artists’ featured photographic series have been well received.  In 2007 Torgovnik was awarded the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from Intended Consequences and took part in leading the Eddie Adams Barnstorm Workshop 2009.  McClintock was awarded the Merit of Excellence and Honorable Mention in the 2007 Color Awards Photography Master’s Cup for The Innocents.

For the duration of the exhibition, the Halsey Gallery will serve as a drop-off point for used book donations to Better World Books, which sells these donations to help fund literacy and education initiatives.  On 19 February, artist Heather McClintock will be on hand at the Halsey Gallery for an exhibition walk-through in conjunction with a screening of The Rescue of Joseph Kony’s Child Soidiers.

Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape and The Innocents:  Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda will be on view at the Halsey through 13 March 2010.

Best of 2009
Dalek (aka James Marshall): Broken, Beaten and Buried
Originally published on January 26, 2009

Earlier this year DailyServing.com partnered with Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC to produce a new site-specific installation by the artist Dalek. Over a two week period a group of 12 artists, under the direction of Dalek, created the entire exhibition which called for every square inch of the gallery to be custom painted. At the closing of the exhibition, DailyServing.com created a full color catalog that documented the entire exhibition process. The signed catalog, which is available for purchase, contains a foreword by DailyServing.com founder and curator of the exhibition, Seth Curcio, as well as a full interview with the artist led by Redux Contemporary Art Center’s director Karen Ann Myers.

Broken, Beaten and Buried is the title of a new site specific installation by the artist James Marshall (aka Dalek), currently on view at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition was organized by DailyServing founder and editor Seth Curcio, and was completed in its entirety over a seven day period by a team of 10 assistants led by Dalek himself. The show broke new ground for the artist, being his most ambitious exhibition to date. Featuring an entirely new and more reductive style of painting, the immersive installation focuses on the psychological effects of color. Dalek painted every part of the exhibition space, literally placing the viewer directly in the artist’s paintings with little to no room for escape.

In April of 2008, Dalek appeared on the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine and in late 2007 he was a featured artist in Swindle Magazine. In years past, Dalek has been featured in countless publications including Tokion Magazine and New American Paintings. In addition, he had his first monograph printed in 2003, Dalek: Nickel Plated Angels, published from Gingko Press.

The artist is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2001/02 he worked as an assistant to Takashi Murakami. He is currently represented by the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, Irvine Contemporary in Washington, D.C, Elms Lester in London and Galerie Magda Danysz in Paris.

Broken, Beaten and Buried will be on view until March 7th, 2009. Upon the closing of the exhibition, DailyServing and Redux Contemporary Art Center will release a full-color catalog, featuring full documentation of the installation with rare photographs, articles and interviews featuring the artist.

Photograph by Rick Rhodes. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (HICA) in Charleston, South Carolina has a long history of celebrating works by artists who exist on the fringe of the mainstream contemporary art world. For the inaugural exhibition of their new gallery space, Director and Senior Curator Mark Sloan is presenting a collection of collage and assemblage works, titled work v. / work n., from a rather unknown artist standing at the edge of her first major museum exhibition, at the ripe age of 74.

The artist, known only as Aldwyth, has long abandoned her first name not in the hopes of being seen in the fashionable lineage of Madonna and Cher, but to conceal her identity as a woman and to neutralize her position as an artist in a male dominated world.  As an artist evaluating the mainstream art world from the sidelines, much of her work confronts the patriarchal genealogy of art from the margins. Similarly described in the bell hooks essay marginality as site of resistance, Aldwyth carefully moves away from marginalization as a site of deprivation and positions herself in a space of resistance, remaining part of the whole but outside the main body of the art world.

Gallery Installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

For decades, Aldwyth has remained rather anonymous, creating work in seclusion in a small coastal island of South Carolina. Many of her works confront issues related to exclusion within recorded art history, like Document, where she attempts to amend the history of art as listed in the 1950’s edition of Canaday and Janson with ongoing personal updates. By endlessly expanding the 1950’s edition, Aldwyth rewrites art history as she sees fit and leaves the end blank for history to continue to write itself.

Aldwyth’s collage works explore the massive through the minute, creating large indexes of images and ideas. In works such as The World According to Zell and Casablanca the artist has created entire worlds that catalog and reveal new meaning through the manipulation of context. The World According to Zell recontextualizes an encyclopedia from 1871 whereas the artist has removed all images in the two volume set to create her own visual history.

Gallery Installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

She has also created an impressive collection of assemblage works with found objects embedded with their own cultural history. Many of the objects tell an abstract story of the artists life, including personal rejection, success, wonder and melancholy. The objects found within her assemblage works offer a direct nod to artists such as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp and much of the Dadaist movement.

While it may seem unfit for an artist who often creates work about being on the outside of an institutional framework to finally be the subject of a major museum exhibition, it is precisely this fact that makes Aldwyth’s work so appealing. Creating work for decades with little to no regard of ever exhibiting her creations has embedded the work with a unique sincerity that comes as a privilege for viewing. To experience the artist’s work is to confront a new history, one that has been rewritten from the outside looking in.

Photograph by Rick Rhodes. Courtesy of the artist and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Work v. / Work n. will be on view at HICA through January 9th, 2010. The exhibition will travel to the Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center for the Arts from February 10th through May 17th, 2010. Work v. / Work n. is accompanied by a full color-catalog.

Joe Johnson’s photographic project Mega Churches is currently on view at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston SC.  The mega church, which can be found throughout the United States, hosts a large congregation of 2,000+ evangelical worshipers and a production of often-televised religious spectacle.  It is a highly relevant subject for the contemporary visual artist to explore as the literal Biblical interpretations such mega churches typically preach influence the US socially and politically.

Johnson maintains a formal distance in his photographic series, Mega Churches, through choosing to capture these vast interior spaces in a state of absence and quiet; in doing so, he avoids human representation that could potentially veer into caricature.  In Johnson’s words, the ‘mechanics of faith’ are his focus in these photographs.  The artist hones in on the rows of seats, acrid neon and fluorescent lighting, corporate decor, theatrical stage sets, large-scale screens and behind-the-scenes computers and wires that define and facilitate the business of worship in the mega church’s arena-like space.

Today’s fundamentalist Christian mega churches appropriate entertainment technology and theatrical production to capture their audiences’ attention – and more sardonically, their pocketbooks.  Through Johnson’s visual emphasis upon the creation of artifice, the artist is perhaps commenting on the insincerity and fallacy of the message these mega spaces serve to convey.

Joe Johnson earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, both in photography.  Johnson’s photographic work has been shown throughout the United States in both solo and group exhibitions.  Johnson is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Missouri and a member of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Johnson’s Mega Churches series has been well received in the US – earning the artist runner up recognition for the 2008 Aperture Portfolio Prize.  The series was previously shown at the Gallery Kayafas in Boston MA from April through May 2009.

Mega Churches remains at Redux Contemporary Art Center through 18 December 2009.