Before the Quake, oil on wood, 36” x 132”, 2006 Courtesy of the Artist

Amy Mercer: You studied plein air landscape painting at the University of California in Santa Barbara and then moved to New York City to study sculpture at Parson’s. How did this transition effect or change your style? You’ve also said that your paintings are a secular response to traditional 19^th Century landscape painters; can you explain the importance of a secular response?

Leslie Wayne: Landscape and abstraction only dovetailed in a very direct way when I decided to confront my early history, and my interest and identification with western landscape. I had mixed feelings about denying the very obvious references to geology and landscape in my work; because I was so invested in the language of abstraction, and it became a question of why was I denying it? Why don’t I look at it?

I began working with the Blue Ocean Institute and was thinking about how we can affect the consumption of endangered species. I read the book written by the founder of BOI, and just thought it was really incredible. The organization’s mandate is to inspire a closer relationship with science, literature and the arts, and before I knew it, I was out there working with the institute in a fundraising role. So ocean conservation was just on my brain at that time. I was starting to really address issues of the environment, and this dovetailed with my desire to confront my history of plein-air landscape painting. I was also reading a thesis written by a friend of mine about the traditional landscape painters of the 19^th Century who were often motivated by religion to express the sublime in nature. All of this created the perfect storm. I was trying to find a contemporary, secular, abstract response to the traditional landscape painting. I’m not an atheist, but for me it was more about finding reverence for the spiritual in nature.

One Big Love #36, Oil on wood, 13” x 13”, 2009, Image Courtesy of the Artist

AM: Process is so important in your work, and you have said that you want viewers to have a visceral response to your paintings; can you talk about the physicality of your materials? How much planning goes into each painting?

LW: I don’t start out with a plan. I’m not looking to make anything specific. I have a general idea of where I want to go, but I like to allow the process to flow. I like to let the shape of the panel suggest where it might go in terms of feeling. I let the shape of the panel dictate a way in which the materials might mimic processes of the natural world, the flow of lava, the weight of water, and the compression and subduction of the earth. In so far as I allow physics if you will, and the phenomenology of the material to lead the way, one could say that process plays a dominant role in the resolution of my work. But it’s not the subject of my work any more than say the properties of steel are the subject of Richard Serra’s work. The issue lies in the degree to which will dominate chance, and intention governs outcome. In Velocity for example (3 panels, 49”x22”), I had a vision of being on the other side of a train and seeing something in motion, but stationary at the same time. The painting was originally 7 panels and I slowly whittled it down. I wanted it to be a vertical snapshot, but also to be seen as a continuum so you could read it from left to right as if the landscape was moving in front of you. That’s one of the few examples of control in my work because the very first panel set the tone for the rhythm of color, and the others had to line up in a way that created a flow. So that piece was more planned out from the start.

AM: You have a series titled, One Big Love that was shown in 2010 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York where you live with your husband, and also included in the Halsey exhibit. These paintings are much smaller and maybe more intimate than the other works at the Halsey. Does gender play a role in your work, and do you think of yourself as a female artist or is gender beside the point?

LW: When I first started painting this way I was very aware that I was coming out of the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism, which was very male dominated. By pressing the heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism into the small format, I was making a feminist statement about the impact of scale: a huge gesture on a small scale. For example, the small works from One Big Love allowed a physical respite from working with larger panels. Years ago someone (who was unsure if Leslie was a male or female’s name) said, something like, ‘oh this work has to be done by a woman because of the way she lifts up the veil of secrecy.’ So I’m aware that building up layers of color are also metaphors for building up layers of thought, and history. You kind of build your own history in this little painting. However, I think you get into dangerous territory when you try to describe work as feminine or masculine. One of the reasons I started to work larger was because I am very aware that I am seen as “the lady who makes the little paintings.” I remember something I said when I gave a talk for a show I was in about ornament and abstraction in contemporary painting… I said that I wanted to make a painting with the seduction of a pink angora sweater and the power of a Barnet Newman.

One Big Love #48, Oil on wood, 12 ½” x 9 ¼”, 2010, Image Courtesy of the Artist

AM: You’ve called yourself a restless artist and I wonder if you can talk about the evolution of your work and what role size and scale have in your evolution?

LW: I do have a restless nature. Maybe I’m doing myself a disservice by not following a trajectory, but my nature is to think where can this go next? I have this innate fear of repeating myself. Given the way I work, something different happens every time. It’s in my nature to keep exploring the unknown.

Recent Work by Leslie Wayne will be on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC through March 12, 2011.

Installation image from the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

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.

The image’s controversy begins with where it has been situated. Instead of placing the mural in the upstairs atrium, beside earlier historical murals, Quashie has positioned it downstairs on the ground floor. The mural is intended to celebrate images of African-Americans omitted from the official historical record. Its location by the cafeteria underscores the reality that for many years past in North Carolina’s history (and throughout the South), the only possibility for African-Americans to be employed in such a space as this School of Government Building would have been as workers in the kitchen or in some form of menial labor.

Acknowledging historic exclusion of African-Americans, Quashie, places the “Greensboro Four,” Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Jibreel Khazan (formely known as Ezell Blair, Jr.), and Franklin McCain, at eye level with the audience, shown larger than life, emphasizing their importance in acting as catalytists, fighting for desegregation, having initiated the historic Greensboro sit-in. They are represented as chefs or “fry-cooks” working literally in the fire of the  alchemical kitchen of social change. Moreover, as personifications of forces for change, they are closest to the modern audience in the fictive space, and closest to the actual kitchen of the real-space restaurant. The “Greensboro Four” shape our experience in the metaphorical restaurant, and have helped “cook up” what we are being offered as a transformative experience (our contemporarily enhanced equality and inclusion).

The power of this presentation is the fact that Quashie has now chosen to segregate the images of blacks even as they are gradually being included in the official canons of history. This separation is itself politically interesting and significant. Quashie has elliptically attacked the racial context of the commission for the mural, despite or because it is intended as an homage to Civil Rights and “black” history. He instinctively rejected the idea of placing this mural with the earlier historical murals and offers instead something unique and unexpected. In place of what could have been a repetitive, pointless gesture, we have a dynamic, politicized conversation; witty, amusing, and not entirely pleasant. No solutions to the confusions of racial conversations can be achieved by a pretense that the past never happened. Understanding this (for both artist and patron) is the difference between generating interesting, meaningful art, as contrasted with stale, empty or meaningless gestures.

The representations of the Civil Rights workers who staged the lunch counter sit-ins at Greensboro’s Woolworths Department Store anchors the image as a visual metaphor, thus, we may sweep into the matrix of a contrived environment to locate a history painting in the realist tradition.  With the main protagonists shown in fry-cook’s outfits, the visual pun is established, a wry tease upon which the mural’s title, Service, can now play continually. The work raises several variations on this theme simultaneously: first, the fact that African-Americans were refused service at segregated establishments (until the 1960s); second, the service to our country that these courageous students and their fore-bearers and counterparts provided in risking their lives to enhance our understanding of the inequities of the time; third, how these Civil Rights workers are serving the general public in helping to create a more equitable American society based on their risky venture; and finally, the fact that most often Africa-Americans were and perhaps still are associated with service or domestic positions in our American popular conscience.

Is this by the artist’s intention? Yes and no. Some is “happy accident,” some is clever and careful contrivance. However, this representation of a group meal invites comparison with another art historical representation, bringing to mind Leonardo’s, (yes, as in da Vinci’s), Last Supper. Not only does the lunch motif position this work squarely in some kind of comparative contention with Western tradition, but its contextual shift to “secular” and “legal” as opposed to a “religious” and “spiritual” cultural impact says something about a significant, modern human shift as well.

The main point is this image is a conceptual work being presented deceptively as  a straight-forward painting. The grouping of figures in the lunchroom setting is a pretext for why such a diverse collection of individuals may be arranged in a relational association, and use of this metaphor benefits the work’s overall conceptual structure. The allegorical luncheonette offers a fitting setting for the work’s historical theme. The image’s messages are transmitted as much by its concept, location and context, as by who or what has been represented.

Beyond the contextual politics, the individuals who are shown in the image, were suggested by a committee established specifically for that purpose. Quashie has blogged his research into the lives of the diverse figures, including: pamphleteer, David Walker (born in 1785), author of an early anti-slavery document urging the enslaved populace to rebel against their captors; writer Charles Chesnutt (born 1858); the amazing Pea Island Life Savers under the command of Richard Etheridge; civil rights activist, Ella Jo Baker (born 1903); concluding with historian John Hope Franklin (born 1915). Many of the details from the historical record as well as the artist’s thoughts on his process are included at www.Quashie.com.

As a final nod to his own connection to the legacy of institutionalized slavery, Quashie indicates his own ancestry as a product of the African diaspora by showing an anonymous slave couple in panel number seven, using as his models an image of his own mother, shown in profile looking upward and to the viewer’s right, and an interpolated image of his father. This element of personal history in an image about exclusion, courage in the face of discrimination, and the search for equality, a struggle for a “seat at the table,” is itself a powerful statement regarding the impact of constructs of race on contemporary society, as it were, up to the very creation of the artwork itself. This dialectical approach to artistic representation is full of intrigue and interest. To our collective benefit, I suggest that we have been “quashied,” a verb, meaning here to cause us to consider, even against our will, the complexities of America’s legacy of law, race, and our ever-curious modes of reasoning.

This review was written by guest writer Frank Martin, member Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA).

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.

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.