Author: Bea Huff Hunter

In an interview with Allie Biswas, Rina Banerjee described early influences, artists Santa Barazza and David C. Driskell, as ‘people who were trying to re-route art history,’ to include ‘the kind of art you were making.’ This process drives Banerjee’s first US survey exhibition, ‘Make Me a Summary of the World’ at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), in which three decades of mixed-media drawing, sculpture and video intervene in PAFA’s architecture and collection of American art.

In the museum’s lobby – whose decor integrates motifs from the Middle East, Victorian Europe and Mughal India – intricate sculptures and drawings introduce the theme of globalization through the lenses of colonialism and environmentalism. In If lotion and potion could heal (2006), long-fingered deep green figures that resemble both Marc Chagall’s ethereal subjects and vaguely Hindu-looking goddesses are encrusted with imported sequins and glitter, and appear to exhale leaves cut from dollar bills. In She is An Uncertain (2007), hung opposite, a similar figure spews green and white bodily fluids onto detailed engineering schematics, printed on Mylar, for the Columbia Center for Disease Control in New York. These works invoke cultural and bodily concepts of circulation and contagion.

At the top of PAFA’s grand staircase, the sculpture Viola from New Orleans-ah (2017), a woman-like creature assembled from found objects, hunches under the weight of the wares of a late-nineteenth-century immigrant peddler: glass beads and horns, shawls, a toy Ferris wheel. Long, taut threads, like rays of light, connect her to a solar ring of metal spokes suspended from the vivid blue vaulted ceiling. In the nearby monumental painting Death on the Pale Horse (1817) by Benjamin West, similar beams of celestial light preside over a violent scene of Christian supremacy. Furthering this revisionist art history, another of PAFA’s galleries has been entirely rehung in conversation with Banerjee’s large scale installation A World Lost (2013), an imaginary island of sand, sparkling mica and the coins of several countries, on which lines of cowrie shells map rivers essential to trade, and piles of plastic cups signal water shortages from climate change. On the gallery’s walls, American master paintings of ports and shipwrecks; native animals hunted and trussed; and a white woman attempting Indian dance are reframed as artefacts of colonisation.

Fragments from diverse periods and cultures collide in Banerjee’s art as they do in vernacular language, and in more deliberate ways in works by contemporary poets of diaspora such as Bhanu Kapil or Divya Victor. The latter wryly notes in W is for Walt Whitman’s Soul (2017) that ‘loot’ was among the first Indian words adopted by English colonizers. Banerjee’s short videos Coconut Oil (2003) and When scenes travel … bubble bubble (2004) feature her own poems scrolling across vignettes of her travels or self-care rituals. Many of Banerjee’s works’ titles (abbreviated in this review) are arguably poems in their own right, comprising stanza-length meditations that refuse to elucidate – and instead dialogue with and complicate – her works’ visual vocabulary. A 2017 sculpture, in which Pyrex laboratory filtration equipment, amber vials, shells, beads and silk are arranged around a replica turtle shell and Polynesian wood mask, bears the following full-length title, which returns the reader once again to the work’s and the world’s challenges:

When signs of origin fade, fall out, if washed away, trickle into separations, precipitate when boiled or filtered to reveal all doubleness as wickedness. Vanishing act that migration, mixation like mothers who hid paternity who could name move me slowly reveal me only when my maker stands straight.

In this multigenerational exhibition curated by Doah Lee, five interdisciplinary artists uncover, celebrate, and question LGBTQ histories and aesthetics while wrestling with their own connections to and alienation from queer history. Gabriel Martinez’s Perpetual Care, 2016, displays heart-wrenching, humorous, and sometimes racially discriminatory personal advertisements—notably, I DON’T WANT TO GROW OLD ALONE, DO YOU? and HOT WHITE BUNS—that the artist unearthed in the William Way LGBT Community Center’s John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia, the city’s central resource for local queer histories. Each ad was enlarged to poster size, printed and etched on a linoleum panel, covered with denim, and sanded down to reveal the text underneath. The process references a comment the artist’s friend made, about sanding the crotch of his jeans to signify virility. These panels are arranged in a tender tactile grid that commemorates forgotten and perhaps unrequited desires. On another wall hang Keenan Bennett’s small black-and-white plywood reliefs, Tile Floor, Scrubbed Hard 4 and Tile Floor, Scrubbed Hard 5, both 2017, whose painted hexagonal patterns recall public bathroom flooring, suggestive of cruising. The center of each tile has been sanded down, which echoes the process in Martinez’s work, but here signals a conflict of appearances, revealing the raw wood beneath the veneer.

A strong lesbian and trans presence permeates the exhibition—a curatorial decision that recognizes the even greater historical invisibility of women and nonbinary folk. Jesse Harrod’s mixed-media drawing Lesbian Agenda, 2016, and Amy Cousins’s protest-sign-style drawing Thousands, 2018, proclaim their wry truths in capitalized headlines: In the latter work, the phrase 1,000S OF ANGRY DYKES CAN’T BE WRONG is rendered in curvy graphite marks that defiantly resemble pubic or leg hairs. Heather Raquel Phillips’s video Hair Gallery I & II, 2018, which intimately documents the artist and other subjects stroking and removing each others’ body hair, meditates on the communities of care that, alongside unwavering protest, make risking such queer visibility possible in this moment.

Suzanne Bocanegra confronts the cultural cliché of women’s vulnerability and distress—unresolved and raw, brought to light again by the #MeToo movement—which is still central to entertainment and artistic production. The exhibition’s title, “Poorly Watched Girls,” and the title of La Fille (all works cited, 2018), an installation of handmade costumes and scenography, were drawn from the eighteenth-century classical ballet La Fille mal gardée, more commonly translated as “The Wayward Daughter.”

Valley is an eight-channel video projection in which eight “strong women artists” (Bocanegra’s words) simultaneously reenact Judy Garland’s wardrobe tests for Valley of the Dolls filmed just before Garland was fired (presumably due to being intoxicated on set) from the 1967 movie. These women include Joan Jonas, Tanya Selvaratnam (who, earlier this year, publicly disclosed physical abuse by a partner), and Carrie Mae Weems. Dressed alternately in orange-and-gold tasseled caftans, fire-engine red skirt suits, paisley pantsuits, and white lamé bell-sleeve dresses, the artists act drunk or high, unsteadily turning on their heels. They quip, whistle, wave, and giggle in near unison, remaining self-assured even as they inhabit Garland’s fragility, a fragility that was, in fact, the basis for one of the central characters in the film.

Dialogue of the Carmelites is contained in a darkened room, each wall lined with spotlighted shelving that displays a series of pages cut from a 1955 guide to Catholic orders, each featuring a black-and-white photograph of a nun wearing her order’s habit, emblazoned by Bocanegra with rich purple, black, and white needlework. A sparse soundtrack of high, harmonizing voices rings out from four corner speakers in a reworking of Francis Poulenc’s 1953–56 opera about the murder of a whole convent in Revolutionary-era France. The pictures of nuns face one another and the viewer, as if congregating to assert the personhood and community denied to their sisters—and urging the viewer to do the same.

The title of Kate Bright’s exhibition, “Soft Estate,” referred to the fertile swaths of land that run parallel to railroads and highways in the UK, where Bright photographed the flourishing nonnative flora that are, in her words, “escapees from the domesticated environment.” Painted from composites of these photographs, Bright’s sensuous—and deeply ethical—canvases extend her two-decade occupation with the landscape as both urgent environmental concern and contested artistic genre.

In Holloway, 2017, which is named after a major London thoroughfare, massive mustard yellow, flame red, peachy orange, and hot-pink leaves tinged with lilac crowded into the foreground like overgrown shrubs blocking a hiking trail, creating the illusion of foliage aggressively pushing out of the painting’s bounds and into the viewer’s physical space. In the past, Bright’s series of (literally) glittering snow-covered landscapes had drawn critical comparisons to Karen Kilimnik’s dreamily picturesque snowscapes and glassy, swirling rivers of Pollockian gesturalism, and to Lucas Samaras’s abstract mirrored and beaded works. Here, however, in choosing a palette conventionally coded as exotic,

Bright seemed to deliberately appropriate contentious modernist Paul Gauguin’s colonialist color harmonies, as exemplified in the much-debated Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), 1892, which depicts brown-skinned Tahitian girls crouching in the foreground of a lush fantasy landscape. By exoticizing banal British roadside fauna, Bright tests the implications of turning a colonizing gaze on a small part of her own culture. While her gesture is potentially problematic given the contextual leap between these painters’ starkly different projects, Bright succeeds in making these familiar views strange (to borrow an anthropological term), unsettling the viewer’s relationship to often unnoticed plants.

Three large-scale works from the series “Between a Dog and a Wolf,” 2018, depicted with buttery brushstrokes the outstretched branches and fluttering teardrop-shaped leaves of the sumac tree, an invasive, sometimes poisonous shrub native to North America and the Middle East. (The tree was introduced to the UK in the early seventeenth century.) The series’ title bluntly points to this tree’s unresolved status as neither domesticated nor wild, the plant having been captured and cultivated at a moment of European imperial expansion and now seeming at home in the margins of exhaust-fumed roadways. The sumac leaves are rendered in what appear to be impossible hues—pastel purples and yellows shimmer alongside toxic oranges and olive greens—yet this tree can truly burst into such vibrant tones in the fall. Intensifying the disquieting implications of Bright’s exoticized palette, this somewhat troubling visual pleasure might foster new understandings of and even behavior toward the natural environment.

This exhibition’s most naturalistic paintings were smaller-scale textural close-ups of ferns rendered in accrued layers of browns: Shelter Belt, 2017, and Bracken, Snape, and Lopeway, all 2016, depicted grasses and thickets along bridle paths. Though there are no human figures populating the scenes—as is the case throughout Bright’s practice—the closely cropped images are framed as if by a person behind a camera. In Shelter Belt, an orange glow seems to come from car headlights beyond the picture plane. In Lopeway, the edge of a torn black plastic bag is visible under the twigs and grass. Whether the bag is a mere piece of litter or the trace of a crime concealed, its inclusion in the tableau reinforces the sense of human threat to a vulnerable environment.

Dogs have played a supporting role in human culture since prehistory, serving as partners and protectors at home, work, and war; the unwitting subjects of medical and psychological abuse; and proxies onto whom we project human emotion and behavior. Explicitly drawing on a range of sources—Greek mythology, pop lyrics, biblical descriptions of Armageddon—eighty-one-year-old artist and activist Leroy Johnson focuses on canines in his densely worked and reworked charcoal and mixed-media drawings on view in “Dogs/Walls/Dark Energy.”  

Five large-scale works on canvas depict the animals roaming through cityscapes with bombed-out buildings, razor wire border walls, and plumes of smoke rising into the sky, heralding destruction. Top Dog and The Significance of Blood (all works 2018) portray feral-looking dogs prowling alone or milling around in packs, baring their teeth as if in newly in charge. Canines with human-looking biceps and triceps strain against taut diagonal leashes in War Dog; in Rites of Atonement and the small-scale “Security” series, they mope with muzzled snouts, as if trussed in gas masks. Three more tear at each other’s throats in Guard Dogs 1.  

The seriality of these works creates a sense of story, one perhaps responding allegorically to the general sense of anxiety in contemporary American politics and society. They’re reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s ten-part classical war story, Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978, or the cell structure of a graphic novel, in which characters move through tightly enclosed scenes. Meanwhile, centered on the room’s rear wall and rendered in opulent jewel tones, the mixed-media painting The Unbearable Lightness of Being evokes stained glass and Stations of the Cross, the Catholic devotional images illustrating Christ’s last day on earth and the possibility of redemption.

Philadelphia-based artists Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck have been collaborating for thirty-five years alongside their work as museum preparators and as a painter and a sculptor, respectively. Titled after the mysterious lights and colors we see when we close our eyes—and inspired by a dream of Feasley’s—the exhibition “Out, Out, Phosphene Candle” continues their sustained exploration of the diverse scientific and mystic methods humans use to grapple with the unseen. Here, the duo’s works are placed in conversation with loaned works by other artists as well as their own selections from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s major collection of art environments and vernacular objects made by untrained artists, including Levi Fisher Ames, Emery Blagdon, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Nick Engelbert. Feasley and Swenbeck’s most ambitious presentation to date in terms of material range, conceptual scope, and sheer scale, the show comprises a series of installations that range from conventional museum hangs of photographs and paintings to darkened rooms crammed with historical artifacts, artworks, and the artists’ personal effects. The exhibition provides a new perspective on the contemporary practice of turning to museum collections to ground, historicize, and refresh artists’ practices, not only reframing the ways we engage with specific groups of objects that have traditionally fallen outside of contemporary art discourse but also positing cross-historical curation as a kind of clairvoyance.

Visitors begin in a low-ceilinged room—part domestic interior, part curiosity cabinet—dimly lit with filaments shaped into roses. The heady perfume of cedarwood emanates from the reddish flooring and from split logs stacked around a tiled fireplace. Oddly shaped portholes punctuate the metallic and cobalt-blue-paneled walls. The view through each little window reveals a different display of both personal and borrowed items, some marked with tiny numbers that correspond to a laminated checklist of works on loan and others left undescribed. In one shrine-like vitrine— which has a black glittery backdrop of spiderweb drawings—ceramic flowers, figurines, and ax heads by Von Bruenchenhein surround the artists’ wedding bands, which are engraved with simplified smiling faces (Feasley and Swenbeck are a married couple). Astral-navigation instruments in a nearby vitrine give a clue as to how to read this grouping: as a constellation in which organic and ancient-looking forms are imbued with mythological patterns by the artists, who remain present by proxy through their rings.

After crawling through the hearth’s threshold, the viewer emerges into a more conventional white-walled, high-ceilinged museum gallery. A mobile of transparent, curved plastic shapes casts morphing shadows onto a dreamily abstract video projection that spans two corner walls. This is the backdrop for an installation grounded by a circular shag area rug geometrically divided into slices of pink, blue, orange, and black to resemble a color wheel used for the magical practice of dowsing. This motif recurs throughout the show, re-created in stained glass and paintings, suggesting that the concept of divination might have paralleled the artists’ act of locating references within the Kohler Arts Center’s collection. Two tightly packed tableaux complete the pathway around this exhibition. Listen, the Snow is Falling, 2018, the only work made by Feasley and Swenbeck that bears a title, is a twinkling, kitschy diorama of snow-powdered firs, contoured mountains, and pink electric candles in a sealed grotto, viewable through Perspex windows cut into geometric patterns. Nearby, and taking up a similar footprint, is an abundant greenhouse-style installation of ceramic and cast-bronze flora, botanic paintings, and neon plastic puddles, all under a silvery mesh canopy of gardener’s shade cloth. Here, Feasley and Swenbeck’s discrete works integrate most fully with objects from the collection. Feasley’s bright painting of an abundantly lucky field of four-leaf clovers hangs next to Nick Engelbert’s equally teeming Flora from Hawaii, ca. 1955, and Von Bruenchenhein’s Lichens Magnified, 1977, while Blagdon’s wire-and-wood mobiles twirl over Swenbeck’s ceramic plants like hanging baskets. These juxtapositions not only recontextualize the self-taught artists as creative peers but position Feasley and Swenbeck as intuitives in a transformative exchange.