"The Waning of Justice" by Charles Atlas at Columbus College of Art and Design

Charles Atlas, The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound.
Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

This Charles Atlas is not the one I grew up with, the grinning body-builder who defined the he-man. This one is the videographer whose career began filming for Merce Cunningham in the 1970s. Atlas expanded his work to develop dance explicitly for the camera rather than for live audiences. The Waning of Justice shows him working not in dance but with a melange of elements—landscapes of sunsets over the ocean, projected grids of numbers, a digital stop-watch ticking its urgent way to zero, enormous words splashed across the walls, replacing one another as if in esoteric  succession. Finally, all this ends by being a weighty, menacing introduction to a wildly upbeat performance by the drag queen Lady Bunny of "You Are the One," filmed close-up.

This massive work fills two high galleries at CCAD's freshly configured Contemporary Art Space. Atlas presents, edits, combines, and overlays video of several kinds into a work that staggers the viewer one way or the other. One either hastens through the room, shaking head  flashing cartoonish question marks; or one pauses with jaw dropped in bafflement. Some will decided to stay and try to answer the rhetorical question, "What the hell is this?"  

This is the question, I'll admit at once, that I asked myself when I encountered Atlas's installation. Had I not been accompanied by the curator, Michael Goodson; had I been in a sullen mood, it's easy to imagine myself as the visitor who decides that life is too short and then clears out quickly. Goodson's enthusiasm, based on his deep knowledge of contemporary art and acquaintance with this artist, held me. His excitement assured me that I should linger and think about this: Lucky me! Still, I lack a contemporary curator's acculturated comfort; each work is a new proposition for me, as it is for many gallery-goers. Trusting Goodson's informed eagerness, what was I to make of this?

Charles Atlas, The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound.
Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

Approaching contemporary art, I search for an interpretation, a way to "make sense" of it. I think that I know when to stop rationalizing, for there are works that yield nothing words can explain. Such art  transports us through feeling or sensation with minimal appeal to our verbal understanding. Some of the art that affects me the most deeply—that is indeed most meaningful to me—is of this sort. 

I think what made The Waning of Justice so disconcerting for me was that the installation is filled with the markers of interpretation: number grids, words related to the projected seascapes, a count-down clock, and, of course, its title. Then, there is the whopping contrast of the final element, the amazingly costumed and be-wigged Lady Bunny gesticulating, shaking, adjusting her wig, completely lacking self-consciousness as she sings disco with spirited instrumental backup. "You Are the One." And how you believe it: She's singing to you.

Atlas produces all these common markers of verbal, rational meaning, but outside of a context that supports intellectual interpretation. They are superimposed on tropical sunsets; numbers line up to float in a vast, darkened space; words are massive but transparent—insubstantial—at the same time. They are juxtaposed with the atmospheric, with the contrast between the fiery red and yellow of the sun setting over the ocean; of the symbolism of the sunset intensified by the clock's running down; by the black void space of the room. The sensations the work delivers are in fact the matter; the words, numbers, grids are secondary to the feeling generated by atmosphere Atlas creates visually. When the clock expires and the sun sets, then Lady Bunny performs in the smaller room, deeply artificial and wondrously positive in her emphatic, multi-costumed performance. It's a change of mood, at the least.

 Charles Atlas,The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound. Featuring Lady Bunny.Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

The Waning of Justice makes sense in the way that mood makes sense. The combination of natural beauty, numerical grids on a black background, the ticking clock, and the elegiac mood invoked by the implied relationships between setting suns and all the other elements reminded me of such usual experiences as reading the Sunday Times. Isn't that the way my world feels, the combination of daily countdowns, the anxiety of the all the half-understood numbers that constrain me, my fleeting perceptions of beauty, my sense of a world in decay? While none of the individual aspects of this installation seems to me to have exceptional meaning, the experience affects me as a scaled-up experience of the Zeitgeist. But with hope added in the form of art. Art of the most brazen, self-confident sort, affirming the viewer as well as the artist.

What an amazing artwork. I am glad l that I stayed to think about it. The thought that I put into it reminded me that the rational exists in a world that is not. If I remember it, I can use that relationship to my benefit.

Perhaps this is why people duck through galleries like this one, though. I can appreciate the urge to flee. Yes, it's time-consuming work to think about something as strange-looking as The Waning of Justice. Nearly everyone is put off by what is alien to their experience. But that doesn't make it desirable to shun new experience, especially experience in the safe zones of art. Where better to exercise the mind and imagination, to solve puzzles, to make connections with the minds of artists who experience and respond to the same world we are living in? 

America has become a place where people are willing to believe that what we don't recognize is alien and therefore threatening; that it is in opposition to us or harmful to us. This is the national attitude toward other people, other cultural practices, and even toward free speech. Contemporary art provides a route to surprises of joy, new ideas, and enhanced experience of the world we occupy daily. It reminds us how to observe closely, how to defuse our suspiciousness of of the odd or alien, and to come to identify with—and so, to love—what we invest time and attention in.

Nothing external makes us stay or go when it comes to art experiences. We like what we know, but what we know usually defines times and points of view long gone by the time we learn them. Even our ideas of beauty, so static, are nostalgic and can make us regretful of a world in which we have doomed ourselves to ignore beauty's new sources and expressions. 

Atlas's The Waning of Justice is, like many frightening new works, art that gives those willing to consider it a receptiveness to expanded ideas of beauty and how to retain them, both in the gallery, reading the market report, regarding nature, and moving through everyday's wildly disparate experiences of meaning, indifference, and absurdity.

Call It Something or Call It Nothing: Maika Carter's Progress

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

View of gallery wall in Maika Carter's Call
It Something or Call It Nothing

In the small Project Room in the Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design, recent graduate Maika Carter is having her first solo show, Call It Something or Call It Nothing, up through February 20. I haven't seen a lot of publicity for it, but I'm delighted to recognize this work of questioning beauty and maturity.

The show is arranged like eight
chapters of a photographic narrative. Its progression from subject to subject is clearly delineated; the content of each unit is presented in distinct, striking images, and the movement from section to section feels organic. Best of all, the last chapter constitutes a synthesis up of all that has come before. What has it added up to? Something essential and true packed into the the mundane and happenstance? Or an affirmation of meaning in life's trivial accumulation? 

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The first photographic grouping—of images large and small, matted and pinned in well-considered groupings to the wall—features shoes, mostly empty. The black and white photograph of ballet flats facing one another across a break in the asphalt has the punch of confident simplicity. We've begun a march or a tour, but there's a question of direction and purpose from the first step. How will we fill the shoes, what is the purpose, where will we go? Carter's photographs, black and white mixed with others of saturated, strong color, don't suggest to me ambiguity so much as they suggest the very human condition of eagerness and determination even in want of a map. The images are all bold. Does the confusion of direction among the shoes indicate folly or indecision? Or simply the fact that life offers little direction?

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

We walk to chapter 2 only to find us in the place of the Missing, where things have vanished or are fading from our sight. This is a grouping of photos that arrest you not with a pounding message, but with an ache of sorrow that accumulates as you have to move up close to the many small images gathered around the larger ones. Many of the photographs on these walls are no larger than 3 inches square. When Carter blurs the content, it increases the intimacy between viewer and picture, leading to heightened emotional impact. The picture of the yellow warning tape leading across the unadorned pavement square causes by suggestion more sorrow than would a lurid, graph crime scene shot.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing. Group
photo including the artist.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It
Nothing.

But the next section of  colorful photographs moves us in the way we respond to the scrapbook of a big, happy family. Carter brings us to a large, rambling spread of smiling relatives and friends of several generations—people happy to be together, happy to do what they are doing, feeling special and loved. I feel certain that this passage of the exhibition will leave no viewer unmoved. Carter's casual arrangement works beautifully here, where we feel the high spirits and warmth including us too. I think that it's partially the scale of the pictures and the fact that we have to approach them closely—as if we were indeed perusing a scrapbook—that makes it feel so inclusive. I reacted to these not as to pictures of strangers, but as to people whose happiness I shared. I felt no barrier. The viewer is one of the company, and happy to be be there as a familiar of these people.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.
Collection of friendship photographs.

Are we reading an autobiography or are we a character in the artist's? Are we following a tale of Everyman? The question cannot help but come to mind at many points, but especially as the narrative descends from confident, social well-being to a chapter of literal effacement—a Slough of Despond if you will. 

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing

Carter gives us many alluring images of humans, but with their faces or head blurred out or cropped from the frame. The smiles, the friendly connections are gone in a new milieu of isolation and anonymity.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something
or Call It Nothing.

The narrative continues through several more chapters that alternate roughly between presence and absence, between happily socialized security and images of vacant, drifting society. 

A chapter focused on the photographer herself is particularly arresting. It would be poignant were the pictures not so bold and frank. As usual, many pictures—large and small—are assembled, but the viewer has to think twice to grasp that the subject is the artist, so they must have been staged. Every one of them has the air of complete spontaneity: funny faces, dramatic poses, but of artistic quality far beyond the photo booth. They are so natural, in fact, that they raise doubts about everything that has come before. Maybe the show really has been the work of an anonymous third party.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The cluster of self-portraits focus on large, matter of fact images in full color and in sepia, of the artist in the hospital, recovering from abdominal surgery. The brilliantly-well lit hospital room with the bloody tubing emanating from her belly is unnerving except that she faces the camera as if she were in conversation with you, the friend close enough to be visiting. Throughout the show, you have been reeled into her world and point of view and now, here you are, paying a post-op visit, the kind you wouldn't be able to stomach with any but your very best friend.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or
Call It Nothing.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or
Call It Nothing.

By the time I arrived at the last section of the show, everything that came before had prepared the way for a rich consideration of the title proposition, Call It Something or Call it Nothing. The photographs in this area switch back and forth until their messages of anxiety and hope at last intuitively merge. The artist wonders, given where she's been and what she's experienced so far, what life is? Something or nothing? Love or anomie? Do we invest in the future? Or do we lie down and see what hits?

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The landscape Carter has chosen for this final reverie is far from dreamy, bucolic, or reassuring. The images are urban, spray-painted, tattooed, and seem remote from the reassuring sense of middle-class order and safety many of us associate with a life and with a future meaning "something."

I'm not sure that Carter is acquainted with John Bunyon's The Pilgrim's Progress, but in this show I feel a connection with that tale of moral trial and resilience. The artist takes us through eight passages of pleasure, doubt, and grief. Without denying beauty, she doesn't stop to lament when it's absent. A calm, even-handed air of acceptance runs throughout the show, whether we witness happy camaraderie or pictures of lost of identity.

I think Maika Carter's first solo show is a knock-out. She shows her powers as a photographer, as a story-teller with an excellent editorial sense, and as an individual with the wisdom and intuition that make her skills important. I, for one, will be following with great interest an artist who shows such maturity straight out of the box.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

Diana Al-Hadid at Columbus College of Art and Design: Invitation

Diana Al-Hadid, Head in the Clouds, 2014. Polymer
gypsum, Fiberglass, steel, foam, wood, plaster, clay,
gold leaf, pigment. 130 x 56 x 50." Courtesy of the 
artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Author photo.

Somewhere between the holiest of holies and the lowliest of lowlys, Diana Al-Hadid's gold-leaf-embellished heaps of industrial materials aspire heavenwards. They soar through our offended sensibilities to reconstruct a lost sense of awe. The material from which they are fabricated acknowledges the chaotic ugliness against which a sense of glory struggles, so improbably, to emerge. 

Put more plainly: Al-Hadid would sometimes appear to be a construction worker run amok. She uses materials like steel rods, gypsum board, mylar, Fiberglass, and plaster to create works that can appear to be literally thrown together, then disintegrated by force or time. Her major pieces in this show might be construed as collections retrieved from scrap piles where a subdivision of McMansions is rising.

This wonderful show disappears from Columbus after the 11th of October, and I regret reviewing it only now, for it's a show that should be widely seen. It's a show for Everyman, exemplary of the reasons to see contemporary work. It's shocking; it's confounding. It is fun. It stimulates one's faculty of curiosity. Any simple observation about it is bound to be right and will lead to yet more fruitful questions and observations. People who think they don't like or understand contemporary art will find that there is nothing to fear in this ultimately accessible work. Why spend time at home with a crossword puzzle, with this show to keep eye and mind lively and acute?

Diana Al-Hadid, detail, Head in the Clouds,
2014.

Fontains Abbey, Yorkshire. Photo by
draGnet, on shothotspot.com/blog/6

I was drawn to Head in the Clouds, this droopy-winged, skeletal angel perched atop the most humble of pedestals (in fact, it sure looks like a particularly nasty, big, black mushroom to me). Certainly not a creature of the flesh, this celestial being seems to have failed the transformation to pure spirit. Or, it could be that it requires the gradual dissolution of the body to become angelic? Or, maybe angels have a lifespan too, and this one has seen better days? I suppose, given the title Al-Hadid has left us with, that the head in the clouds—and, indeed, the head retains its form—might signal a valuing of spirit over substance. 


However one wishes to interpret this sculpture, though, there is something awe-inspiring about it. The gold-leaf imparts an unquestionable sense of precious value despite its decrepit form, and the definition by multiple, slender vertical lines certainly suggests Gothic architecture—the upsurging shafts, piers, mullions, and pinnacles. The angel's body is like a deserted, derelict abbey, on which 18th century English authors built the gothic novel—or William Beckford built his own romantic monument to impossible verticality, Fonthill Abbey. 

And a sense of the Romantic resides in all of Al-Hadid's work in this show. It is grand in gesture and use of space. It is histrionic, theatrical, madly demonstrative. In the clarity of its contrasts and the extremes of its positions, it actively invites engagement and interpretation.

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, 2014. Polymer gypsum, Fiberglass, steel, plaster, gold leaf, pigment. 44x 96 x 6."
Collection of Dave and Nancy Gill. Author photograph.

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, detail

Another reason that Al-Hadid's work is riveting is that her own extraordinary level of engagement announces itself in every work. The artist's high levels of idea and self-awareness don't cancel an almost naive abandon with which she seems to attack her work. Sun Beard is an almost-two dimensional panel; the surface sits on a wooden frame, and the surface has the depth created by accumulated layers of heavy materials. On the top of it all, she has painted, in the upper left corner, a radiating sun in golden tones. Opposite, there's what I take to be the traditional image of North Wind, whose black "beard" is the blast of cold breath he blows. Here, the two elements appear forcefully to compete against a scrim of…icicles? rain? shadows in cosmic regions?

Diana Al-Hadid, Sun Beard, detail.

The painting supports the intensity of the conflict by its utter lack of finesse. The sun, in the first place, is placed where children often put it to shine down on the scene below. It's quartered, serving as stage-lights that insure the visibility of the normal scene below. She has painted it at high speed, without mixing colors, in big, sloppy strokes, as if she just wanted to get the job done: "There it is. Finished: The Sun. Next: The Wind." And then on the opposite side, the old man with the beard is devised in the same manner: simply placed, no mixing of colors, no time taken with the drawing. She's satisfied that we recognize him, and that's enough.

In Sun Beard, then, we see Al-Hadid doing something very different than she did with Head in the Clouds. The similarities of materials and signature appearance are obvious. But in this work she shows her consummate confidence. I like the revelation of this childlike aspect of her artistic persona. She will do what she wants to, needs to, feels immediately the urge to do. It suggests that sophistication is not what she's promoting, but vision.  

Diana Al-Hadid, Nolli's Orders, 2012. Steel, wood, polystyrene, plaster, polymer gypsum, Fiberglass, alumninum foil, silver leaf, paint.
122 x 264 x 288." Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Author photo.

The jaw-dropping Nolli's Orders commands center stage in Al-Hadid's CCAD show. Solid cascades fall from level to level, as water in a great, natural field of slate—or as in it's opposite, a monumental, baroque fountain. The draperies that form a platform between the watery event and the "underground" structured, gothic galleries, are infused with pigments. These come across as sylvan, with pastel rose and leaf green dominating in soft, irregular patches against the white—as if this huge, theatrical structure sits on a mossy bank.

Theater it is, both set and drama. The audience provides the action in moving around and around, peering into, up and down at the amazing variety of perspectives and elements of the work.

 Nolli's Orders refers to a famous map of Rome made in 1748, made by the architect, Giambattista Nolli, so the title confirms the reference to Rome's grandeur, its monuments, and even to its partition, since Nolli's map was made to distinguish the different areas of the city. But Al-Hadid clearly doesn't want to leave anything unmixed. In the view to the left, one could be a spelunker deep inside a cave, entirely forgetful of the seeming abbey cloisters from which the whole form arises.

Yet across Al-Hadid's landscape are draped the naked forms of men in the lounging or curled poses familiar from classical sculpture. But Nolli's Orders does not rise to the climax of the Trevi Fountain's commanding figure, Ocean, before which the others are supine. The monument builds to anti-climax, in a joke about itself.

Those figures (hollow at the back, one finds) are also exceedingly disproportionate adding to the general feeling of screwy perspective and weirdly layered meanings.nate to the the layers they are draped across, adding to the general feeling of screwy perspective and weirdly layered meanings.

Are humans overwhelming the natural landscape? Are they causing the collapse of civilization? Their civilization, founded on the galleries of the Renaissance, has bloated and crumbled. Is it our task now to begin again redefine art and nature? Or, perhaps, to reintegrate them?

Al-Hadid's work, seeming at first so overwhelming, is at heart wide-open. Her world of reference is vast: The Church; art history, disappearance and resurrection (Head in the Clouds); nature and pagan folk tales (the North Wind in Sun Beard); classical antiquity and its heirs; deterioration in Nolli's Orders. And this is only half the show, loaded with more significant, unique works.

I love this show. It should be the whoop-it-up emblem for the slogan, Fear No Art. Diana Al-Hadid clearly works as hard as a construction worker, but with the fever of an artist whose mind is an explosion of ideas. This woman seems to be receptive to everything that has ever come her way, and is capable of putting any bit of experience or knowledge to use. The multiplicity of meanings we can derive from her work is bracing. The humor and poignancy; the ideas and materials brought from high and common culture alike—everything makes us wonder why we've been content with boxes when flow works so well. She strips the flesh off and lets the structure support the ideas; she lets her intentions fall into one another and sees what happens at the next level. Simply by observing her work, trying to follow the flow, we can't help but feel ourselves loosen and lighten up, to begin blending what used to be so clear, so captive.

For Instance Laura Bidwa

For Instance Me is the title of 

Laura Bidwa, Creature I Don't Know (green), 2012. Oil and acrylic
on panel, 11 x 15."

painter Laura Bidwa's current show in Room, an intimate gallery space at Columbus College of Art and Design. You'll have to sprint to see it by the time this review comes out (it closes on November 15), but your raised pulse will calm once you get there. Bidwa's work is contemplative, mysterious, and serene. A visit to this show is like looking into  the variety and nuance of one beautiful, thoughtful mind. The thirteen paintings arise from one visual premise yet they show great variety. There's no doubt that you stand in a unified, unique environment. You have the opportunity to explore its fascinating details, for within the given of a loosely gathered, pastel mass situated against a black background, each painting is wholly independent of its neighbors. It's one cast of mind with many kinds of thoughts.

Bidwa engages us with the figures—those irregular, translucent forms that sometimes drift, sometimes propel themselves across the black, sanded fields of her paintings—by means of suggestive titles. These never explain, declare, or pin down her subjects because ambiguity is their nature. 

Laura Bidwa, Creature I Don't Know (yellow, 1), 2012. Oil and acrylic on
panel, 11 x 15."

A big part of my pleasure in Bidwa's work is a sense of peace with undefined outcomes. Four of the thirteen paintings are Creature(s) I Don't Know. Well, I sure don't either! But there they are, whether or not I know or can define them. These paintings—with figures of various colors, densities, shapes, positions; placed against backgrounds of greater or lesser opacity—have quite a strong effect on me. They remind me of the frequency of my own "unknown," subliminal thoughts. Do they move across my consciousness like meteorites; like dust; like clouds? Are they fragments, or blind spots? Do I see the thoughts I don't focus on? Or do I simply neglect them? My ideas may have nothing at all to do with what Bidwa thought or sought to do. But the multivalence of art is one standard of its power. Considered this way, Bidwa's is explosive.

Laura Bidwa, Literally. Oil and acrylic on panel, 17 x 22."

Bidwa is clearly not an automatic painter—she does not paint in a trance, nor give us what comes to her spontaneously. But it is part of her art to convey a sense of the momentary, yet to still it so we can seize upon the flashpoint of connection, when a word or a vision blinks across the mind, usually to be lost as it occurs. I cannot parse or explain her painting, Literally. But the invitation to connect the word, the concept, and the image can't be passed up. "Literally" makes us think of something accurate, real, and certain. What does it mean that the figure is suspended, has substance, and pleasing color? That the black background is rent, exposing a creamy beyond? Bidwa nudges us into alertness to quiet questions, and into a sense that they are all around us, breathing into the thin fabric of daily consciousness.

Laura Bidwa, That's the Way That It Ends, Oil and Acrylic on panel, 17 x 22."

I particularly like the painting,That's the Way That It Ends, especially in its relationship to the others in the show. In this one, Bidwa has not sanded off any of the black paint. In fact, she has returned with it to partially paint over the colored figure. She has applied dots of color to the surface of many of her paintings in a way that feels almost light-hearted. When she does it here, their force is different because they bolster a sense of spatial depth. In all of the paintings one feels three dimensions, but in few do the layers of space seem to impinge on one another. Here they do, as the figure seems to be absorbed into the unbroken background. That's the Way That It Ends, folks. This image is unrelieved and heavy in contrast to its neighbors, adding an arresting change of mood and idea to the show.

For Instance Me is a masterful show. Bidwa does subtle and resonant work with a just a few, repeated visual elements. She is utterly confident in her process, materials, and the strength of her communication. She is also aware of the breadth and depth of her potential audience. Through her titles especially, she open doors to the mysterious paintings and encourages our minds to travel the ground she has traced.

Of Phoenix Rising: Leonardo Drew at the Columbus College of Art and Design

By the time I left the show of sculpture and drawing by Leonardo Drew—just opened at the Canzani Gallery of Columbus College of Art and Design—I understood why its title is Exhumation. Going in, I didn't pay much attention to the title, for I was immediately taken up with the look of these mighty things—at once looming and harsh, suave and warm—that fill the gallery. 

Leonard Drew, detail from 155, 2012.
Wood. Author photo.

Nearly everything is brown and constructed of wood, and the forms—undulating, rocketing, rough and disciplined at once—sometimes sing out with beauty. But the closer you come to any piece, the more you understand that you spend your life shunning exactly the materials that Drew favors: decayed, splintered bits of wood, street detritus, scraps of filthy fabric, rusted shards of metal. And while there's no offal that I detected, my body instinctively reacted to the threat that I'd encounter it in just such collections of over-used, superannuated, abandoned, then salvaged junk.

But I have already misled you, for there is no junk here despite the fact that Drew's materials have been exhumed from urban shallow graves. Like an Enlightenment anatomist, a medieval alchemist, or a twenty-first century recycler, he's used his rude pickings for his own ingenious researches. His transformations, though, never alter the original materials. Every mark of history remains in every component in the work. Nothing is gussied up, painted over or hidden behind a decorative aesthetic curtain. If the phrase, "building on the past," has ever been given material form, it's in Drew's work.

Leonardo Drew, 14, 1990. Rust on wood. 103 x 83 x 1.25." Photo
courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins.

Rather than naming his works, Drew numbers them. The higher the number, the more recent the work. I like that this leaves entirely open the interpretation of any piece, which immediately brings the viewer back to square one: the materials and their arrangement. He has made what he can of them. Now we make what we can of the work. 

Drew deals in a wide variety of sizes. He presents in this show works as small as drawings of 24 x 24," and as large as a wall-consuming 156 x 216," which juts 72" forward. Yet every piece is constructed similarly, of many multiples of small components: sticks, fabric scraps, or, as in 14, rust and earth. His works are fascinating wholes that irresistibly pull us in to examine the beat up, burnt, and dirty microcosms they arise from.  

Leonardo Drew, 14, 1990. Rust on wood. Detail. Author photo.

A friend of mine once shared her poetic memory of looking out a high window in New York City down to a drilling site in the street below. She recounted how shocked and heartened she was by the sight of dirt—of earth—exposed by the sewer workers: She had forgotten that the city had anything to do with the natural world.

I'm reminded of that story by Drew's work. Number 14, a great, chocolatey slab composed of found wood with strips of rusting metal, manages despite its humble materials to communicate something vernal in its deep variegated dispersal of rich reddish browns. It doesn't make me ill-at-ease; it doesn't feel "city," despite the elements of its composition. Wood didn't come from the city, even if it became part of the artistic process there. The wood and its history are more ancient than whatever structures gave it up to Drew. Is it an accident that it appears to be a door? A threshold into the memories of another time and place, locked into the essence of the material?

Thatching. Ben W, Bell photo.

Leonardo Drew, 155, 2012. Wood. 55 x 58 x 61." (Left view).
Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins.

I was particularly interested in 155, a wall sculpture that called to my mind, above all else, a sense of place. Drew uses his charred, broken, and worn pieces of wood to create elegant forms and surfaces. These reminded me of walls made not from discarded, but from choice natural materials. I see the structures of terraced shale walls, of trimmed thatch; even of the wood pile and the forests that surround country homes with these features. The work suggests architecture in forested landscape. The precision with which Drew sees and handles surfaces create a unified environment of highly differentiated materials, comparable to woodland dwellings that seek to achieve the same goal of introducing the cultivated hand comfortably into a natural setting.

Forest House, A. Michael Flowers, Architect.

Leonardo Drew, 155, 2012. 55 x 58 x61."" (Right view).
Image courtesy of Siikkema Jenkins.

Leonardo Drew, 155, detail. Courtesy of
Sikkema Jenkins

Even without an 

interpretative fantasy like mine, the elegant contrasts of smooth, napped, and rough, ragged surfaces is fascinating. So is the way the improbable descending serpentine wall divides the work into two sections that also reflect each other, with refined and raw elements. The work is precarious; disciplined; dynamic, and stable all at once. And it is extremely beautiful, risen from the ashes and returned to the woods.

153 makes abundant use of the "thatching" technique to mysterious, poetic effect. The kind of surface contrasts he exploits in 155 are simpler and balder, and the shapes are  extraordinarily clean—as clean as a topiary garden recently trimmed. 

Drew's sculptures are apparently moved from place to place in units that local installers then reassemble. In 153, this practice is evident in the hard distinctions between the soft mounds and the cut-away edges that expose the grayed-out, grimy wood surfaces or "floors." They remind me too of the surfaces of anvils.

These surfaces had the effect on me of confusing my responses to the scale of the work. Standing apart and taking in the whole, I have the sense of seeing a topiary garden or exotic landscape marked by deep contrasts of hills and valleys. Yet when I'm close enough to encounter one of these surfaces, they have no aspect of illusion: They are just the size they are. They are literal and do not participate in any metaphorical or imaginary scheme.

Leonard Drew, 153, left angle. 2012. Wood, 50 x 71.5 x 28."
Photo courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins.

Complicating the question of scale yet again is the long comparative flat tongue that extends from the right side of 153. This is constructed of tiny scraps of wood insinuated into slots that run in parallel in horizontal lines like the buildings of different heights along avenues of a city seen from the air. Indeed, the similar scraps that ring the flat extension form a distant urban horizon.

Leonardo Drew, 153, "skyline and avenues,"
 detail. Author photo.

Again, I find myself discussing the work in terms of environments, which may or may not have occurred to Drew. But the larger point is that he creates poignant contrasts within highly unified compositions. He does this through brilliant manipulation of a single set of materials—materials that become elevated in the process. 

Exhumation includes a few of Drew's drawings. A drawing is, simply stated, a work of marks on paper. It's not made in multiples or by photographic process; it's unique. Few argue anymore that it has to be made of pencil, charcoal, or ink; but how far the definition stretches is a question raised on many occasions for marginal analysis. Like Drew's 137D.

Leonardo Drew, 137D, 2012. Wood, aluminum, paint, and graphite on paper. 37.5 x 43 x 25.5." Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins.

Leonardo Jenkins, 137D,  detail. Wood, aluminum , and graphite
on paper, 2012. Author photo.

It's paper mounted on wood, and it incorporates graphite marks as well as wood, aluminum, and paint. While the contrast of the the sheet metal next to the used scrap lumber is arresting at first glance, it only sets the stage for more and more poignant contrasts deeper within the work. If this is where the trash can overflows outside the promise of the future, it's an ironic story at the least. The aluminum side, with shapes very like those in 153, rather than looking suave, appears ill-constructed. It's sloppy construction is held together by far too  many screws, yet it still gapes imprecisely. On the wooden side, the junk wood resembles lightening bolts or an army of arrows and spears launched in vengeance—an uprising that will not be suppressed. The vitality seems not even to be "built into" the discarded and reclaimed wood: It's inherent. Drew constructs 137D to emphasize the life of the material itself, its vigor, durability—the spring in its soul. When one examines the wooden side close-up, one finds nothing like the conspicuous riveting that holds the pliable sheet metal together. Aside from a few rusty nails that came as part of some two-by-fours, there are no traces of the mechanisms that hold the wood in position. You know that it's joined by its own will and force.

   

155, 153, and 137D were all made in 2012 and share a similar aesthetic of elegance and power that arise not only despite the nature of the materials, but even because of it. In two much larger, earlier works, Drew handles his found materials in grittier ways—ways in which I feel no pull of the forest as I found even in 1990's wood and rust 14.

Leonardo Drew, 64, 1998. Fabric and metal with rust on wood. 120 x 240 x 6."
Image courtesy of Sikkema and Jenkins.

The immense, wall-sized 64  is composed of hundreds of small square boxes, each of which is stuffed or covered with bits of fabric, batting, threads, and scraps of lace and what might once have been quilts or rugs. As the full-scale photograph represents, from across the room, it appears like a huge, compartmentalized drawer for classification of small things. It's in your grandfather's workshop; in the dusty shop of an ancient someone selling sewing notions, trims and buttons. Unlike the dynamic works we've seen above, this piece actively casts off a sense of age. It's flatness is part of it and the fact that the material that protrudes from its surface is without suspense. It's filthy; it droops and hangs.  

                                               

To approach 64 and inspect it close-up is discouraging. It puts you in a place you really do not want to be. Nearly every small element potentially conceals something else and every instinct warns that the secrets hidden in this work are not the sort one wishes to know. Where every work we've seen so far is built around multiple juxtapositions (form, texture, scale, etc.), this one is continual infinite repetition. It is so tall and so wide that at no point standing close enough to examine its surface can one's field of vision even take in the edges.

Leonardo Drew, 64, 1998, detail. Fabric, metal, and

 rust on wood. Author photos.

64 is one work in Exhumation in which there is no projection, nor any beauty revealed in the raw materials. Because of the repetitious form and the insistent filling or screening of each box, the work becomes a warren, a slum, favela. Public housing? A prison? Concentration or refugee camp? It's the only work in the show in which the artist assumes the guise of power by implying that all the components of the work are disgusting. In no other work does the artist seem to assume the role of master, even ironically.

Leonardo Drew is a Black. Because of that fact, race has to be a factor in his work, as an immigrant's identity will always dominant his identity in an adopted home. Blacks have reasons to be ill at ease with concepts many of us don't even think to explore: history or future; our movement through the built and natural environments; the hazards of interpretation by others; possession of property; one's sense of personal worth.  

Through his selection of materials and the extraordinary, surprising ways he uses them, Drew deals with race metaphorically, I believe, in every project. That's the significance and sorrow of 64's bleakness and enormous scale.

Leonardo Drew, 133, 1998. Wood and mixed media. 144 x 158 x 2." Courtesy

of Sikkema Jenkins.

From ten years later comes 133, laid out in a manner similar to 64, but, lacking boxes. Only the contents remain. The boxes have dissolved to leave a freshly-painted white wall to which the street gleanings are directly secured. As in 64, we see nothing project, but neither is anything dangling or dirty. From a distance, the forms are all horizontal, like a linear language—Morse code's dots and dashes. It's a paragraph charged with meaning.

Although this piece is unlike everything else in  Exhumation for being an unconnected assemblage of materials, I find it exciting for the implication of legibility. Read it from left to right or right to left; start at the top or the bottom, and read into each mark the significance you bring to it. Still, it remains whole: The language is unified in its vocabulary. 

Leonardo Drew, 133, details, 2009. Author photos.

As in all Drew's work, the view gives substantially different impressions at a distance and close up. The elegant calligraphy composed into a measured, balanced composition from across the room appears as distantly spaced microcosms when examined close-up. Each element stands out for its own rough, used character. 

Nothing is more normal than white print or script upon a white page. In most cultures, and most certainly in ours, that is how textual language is transmitted. In this work, though, by an eminent Black artist, there's an invitation to think again about the nature of black words on the simple white background. In 133, each black mark, each word, is a workhorse. It is a mark filled with history and the power of experience. We tend to forget the language when we use words. We use words as if they are light and disposable, not as if they have carried loads and have histories.

Perhaps that's how history feels to Black people who helped build a white world where there's a tradition of their doing conspicuous yet overlooked work. Each dark element of this beautiful piece is both used, accomplished, and isolated in dignity. They make a pattern, like black pearls on a satin bed, seen for what they are. These are words read for their root meanings, not scanned over to get to the punch line.

 Leonardo Drew, 133, detail, 2009. Author photo.