2006
Rochester Biennial is on display at the MemorialArtGallery, 500
University Avenue, through September 10. Hours:
Wednesday-Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday til 9 p.m. $7; $5 seniors and
students; children 6-18, $2. Reduced general admission, $2, Thursdays 5-9 p.m.
473-7720, mag.rochester.edu.
Celebrating the heroism of modern life
You
know it must be summer when the MemorialArtGallery
turns to and champions the art and artists of our upstate region. Currently on
view is the second outing for the Rochester
Biennial, an exhibition that highlights the work of a small selection of
invited artists.
Like
the inaugural Biennial, the
curatorial team is again comprised of Grant Holcomb, director; Marie Via,
director of exhibitions; and Marlene Hamann-Whitmore, curator of exhibitions.
The team continues to emphasize a commitment to excellence. But what is really
interesting to note is how the use of metaphor not only also occurs again in
terms of a kind of connection that runs through all of the work, but also how
the seemingly disparate now becomes related. That’s no easy task to accomplish
when you have six artists working in six entirely different media.
Consider the work of Michael Rogers, a faculty member of the
School for American Crafts at RIT. Regardless of whether you enter the
designated “special exhibitions” space from doors on the east — in which case
you’ll first encounter the large-scale woodcuts of Phillia Yi — or if you
come in from the south, where you’ll be immediately confronted by Rogers’
installation, the work looms large. The impression is
not a “hit-you-over-the-head” kind of bombast, but rather more like you’ve just
come upon a sleeping giant. You want to tread quietly, slowly, while you
contemplate all that surrounds you.
And
what surrounds you in this dedicated space are seven works that, although
created independent of one another over the course of nearly a decade, come
together as a unified whole. It is a space where you can — to paraphrase Rogers — learn
“vicariously through an [artist’s] experience and creativity.” For example,
“The Flock” is an elegantly poetic wall arrangement of eight cast-glass framed
images of birds in flight. There is something wistful about them. They seem to
evoke another time, another place…a modern-day memento mori.
This
theme of remembrance and longing, or better yet, the bittersweet reminder of
the transitory nature of one’s existence, is evoked throughout Rogers’ work. But it is also discernable
elsewhere in the exhibition, such as in the slyly humorous work of Allen
Topolski or the meditative photographs of Carl Chiarenza.
Topolski collects domestic appliances, mostly ones from the 1950s and ’60s,
and alters them in ways that render them functionless yet vaguely familiar.
Does “Part of an Old Future” make ice cream, dry hair, or just zip around like
R2D2, helping out the happy homemaker when the need arises? Sometimes the
artist has made multiple alterations while other times hardly anything has
changed at all — maybe just a switch is added or the orientation of the
object is altered in such a way that masks its original use. For example, a
pair of foot massagers are now wall apparatuses that teeter between begging us
to ask “what do these do?” and simply existing as something that quite
naturally just belongs on the wall,
like a picture.
While
these “faux appliances” may offer a promise of increased domestic leisure
through the help of technology, and feature titles such as “A Tool for Making
of a Happy Home” or “Living the Dream,” they also suggest a future that has
never arrived. This is a darker side of the social and the private to which
Topolski also alludes.
There is a dark side as well in the photographs of Carl
Chiarenza. Collages consisting of paper, film, foil, and other materials have
been transformed into events of light and form. Indeed, they are
transformations in silver, gelatin silver, and are now strikingly beautiful
black and white photographs. While it may seem that the very mention of “black
and white” precludes the use of color, these photographs, representing
selections from two recent series, Peace
Warriors and Solitudes, are
astoundingly rich in a range of tonalities. They are anything but “black and
white.”
In
their fragmentation and ephemerality, the images evoke a sense that something
is lost or in the process of being lost — a passing. Each exudes a requiem-like silence appropriate for the
passing of a hero or the remembrance of an age of heroes, perhaps the very
“heroes” Chiarenza refers to in the parenthetical titles of the Peace Warriors series (e.g., Don
Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Samurai).
Here,
warriors and heroes dream of a future that is at times unattainable but must be
fought for so as to find a Utopia that is a real place. Certainly Sancho Panza,
the realist and loyal servant, understood that warriors like his master Don
Quixote fight for all of us in his belief in fantasy and beauty and solitude.
In the hands of Chiarenza, the photographs express an evocative tension between
light and dark that metaphorically longs for the solitude of the hero/warrior/
individual/artist.
Was
it not Charles Baudelaire who said that an artist should celebrate the heroism
of modern life? Happily for us, all of the artists included in this exhibition
do exactly that — whether quietly contemplative or exuberantly joyous, as in
the very colorful quilted constructions of Carol Taylor or the still-life
paintings of Sydney Licht.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.
