Sub-Rural # 51, LAB^4 Project, Art Lit Lab, Madison

 

Madison’s Arts + Literature Laboartory’s “LAB^4 project” invited Madison-area artists and community members to create two summers of programming and exhibitions. The current exhibitions were organized by six community members who stepped into the role as curator, and collaboratively selected artists for six conceptually overlapping exhibitions which collectively explore the concepts and places we call “home” across cultures, spaces, time, and language. The exhibitions feature  painting, installation, video, textiles, performance, and a spectator tasking event.

First up is mars, an artist and eco-restorationist who recognizes women builders through investigations of place and in this case, horticulture. Her exhibition, “Willow Sanctuary” is an internalized museological landscape display of saplings and plants that reflect the work of activist Sojourner Truth and her stealth construction of contemplation and spiritualism. Truth, constructed a woven sanctuary using found woody vegetation in a hidden space near land she was forced to steward during her enslavement. She developed a structure as a safe space to communicate with Spirit and Ancestors; a respite from the adversities of her daily life.

Mars’s corporeal “Ecostructures” embody spiritual and cultural histories of African and American-Black women and are designed to re-contextualize their histories naturally,  symbolically, and domestically. The installation includes a wall of drifting vertical saplings and a human-scaled dome structure with a floor textile designed for meditation. More diminutive works simply include plants and short-twigged domes. One pedestal contains stems, stones, a hand-built clay pot and an aloe vera plant presenting like a reliquary. The gallery transfigures as a profoundly aestheticized, gently crafted domicile/temple hybrid.

“Persistence of the Unsorted”, “the exuberance of impure existence” is a collaboration by Sara Black, Jessie Mott, and Claire Pentecost and it’s largely made up of objects and ideas that have fallen through the cracks of modern art discourse. “Persistence” is an installation comprised of a yellow 4ft. by 6ft. construction scaffold containing a vintage infant’s cradle. The scaffold and suspended cradle are cramped with a collection of stuffed toys, small taxidermied animals and birds, unassuming watercolors of partially skinned animals, and dried flower arrangements. Scarves, planetary globes, tethered grass swatches, a tortoise shell, a wicker basket of stuffed birds, another of textiles and animal fur, make it raw subterfuge for a lost narrative.

It’s difficult to freshly populate an anti-formal assemblage with an Arcimboldo-like body double but there it is. There may be more transitory antagonistic forms that strike at the heart of sculpture, the mind of painting, and the memory of  architecture, but few that distinguish themselves as much from the rational and marketable. A fuzzy boundaryless, ethnographically absent, and deterritorialist art is alienating enough without the scent of Joseph Bueys’ dead hare wafting from a trail of neglected toy cradles.

Yet this improvisational and improbable fusion of work, the disquieting images of fur and subaltern erotica, launched from the attic rather than the art studio, is undeniably literary and anti-charismatic. It besets the gallery. Phobias swell in the shadows of an unutterable, performance turning the role of craft, hoarding and un-naming into toxic shadow puppet theater. Recently I concluded a piece on Dieter Roth with this description of chaos. “The assemblage can be a cacophony of things that place sign and signified in a morphological and grammatical predicament, a trembling mass of things forgotten, that you recognize but have no code….yet make a place for.”

Poornima Moorthy’s “Whimsyland” series is a body of digital prints which explore a complex of personal and cultural affairs. It explores enchantment as a psychological and emotional reality, an intimacy that can be encouraged, sought out, and pictured freely. Her pictures of flowing map-like abstractions, some which include portraits, are immersed in a spirited revision of East Asian art and architectural motifs. Their hallucinatory veneer call to mind the 1960’s when most of America first embraced its transnational psychedelic potential.

Moorthy is skillful at composing arboreal forms awash with flowers and small animals, some which are reminiscent of Hindu textiles and temple statuary. Among them are rare birds, whales, rabbits, insects, star forms, and explosions of paisley mingling with spotted leaves and soft drifting pigment. She steers fluid networks of mark-making through soft pigment in shallow surfaces and channels sacred figuration and temple ornaments. Her drawings seem reflective of Kama, the orbit of passion embedded in holistic images of nature and human pleasure.

Moorthy encloses abstraction with figurative detail, draws attention to the deep-rooted connections in pattern, figuration, and vivid pictorial space in the arc of description between the modern and the ancient. Magic is a term that the artist prefers to qualify the dreamlike trajectory of her forms. However, the term can become tangled semiotically in art that pushes up on institutional and culturtural conventions. The establishment of an evocative art language, like Moorthy’s, based partially in non-Western culture, is rather a coherent and concrete practice that’s much more a romantic and surreal construction than an unreal one.

Ronaldo V Wilson, is a celebrated poet known for his mixed media prose that stretches across ink wash drawings, post-robotic dance, and anti-trance vocal descriptions of his life as a video artist, SoCal academic and flâneur. His exhibition, consisting of films and three of his books, is housed in a quiet second-story study packed with books, CD’s, exhibition catalogues, and journals. His enfolded artworks and spoken word expression share constantly overlapping details of place, body, and sound identification and his idiosyncratic reflections pitch a brave new bohemianism.

Three interrelated videos bring the artist’s broader sensibility and sensitivities into focus. They consist of a mixture of stunning, sometimes vanishing, shore images shrouding withdrawn and stressed street life. Any narrative about the artist’s harbor rapport in these scenes involves rhythmic illumination and quick-cutting and camera work is the most poignant and revolving subject. Viewers are beckoned to enter the subject in the order of the best Brechtian method. Wilson’s pictorialism is strongly improvisational, circular, and peripheral, much like the underground films of the late 60’s and knows just how to update that game-changing, formerly radical, free verse fusion.

A more lighthearted group of works sharing the second floor is “The Little Free Art Library.” Along the west wall are small objects that represent the artists who intervened with six free libraries across Madison. Each library has been creatively renovated and magnified, along with their relationship to homes and neighborhood streets. The pleasure of the project is partially in the site quest, enabled by a fold-out pocket-map designed by local designer T.L. Luke. The chart assists in modifying the library’s identity as a hybrid library/museum and is a key to providing literary and graphic symbiosis.

Jewel Millard’s intervention at 2214 Eton Ridge was the perfect neighborhood revelation in an address where the owners had previously transformed an otherwise ordinary corner lot into a botanical garden. Millard camouflaged the structure  to blend with the surrounding thicket of flowers and included an ode to the grateful shade of a neighboring Paw Paw tree. The idea of free information, paraphernalia, and design already exists in some capacity with most free libraries, but is particularly enhanced here, through an overarching communal sense of home.

The notion of producing an artwork for your front yard is art in contextual custody. Much contemporary art fades when linking place theory to Identity and can feel pre-digested tacked on white walls. Similarly, art theory comes apart in urban settings with digitally compromised murals and even the best understated architecture. When literally brought home, however, you can’t beat the handmade experience of a totally engrossing, surprisingly romantic, beautifully designed, retabloesque artifact –  as positively vernacular and as domestic as you can get.

Lastly, “Stitching the Story: Capturing Heart and Resilience through the Story Cloth”, is a profound example of cultural reflection and reckoning for the originally nomadic Hmong population that supported American soldiers and their own families while at great risk during Americas Secret War in Laos. The story cloths depict the descendants of a distinct ethnic group with a strong oral tradition and long history of migration from oppression in northern China. By the 1950’s the Hmong settled in remote farming villages Loas, Myanmar, and Thailand, continued to resist assimilation, but were gradually compromised by U.S. foreign policy.

Many Hmong women still practice a form of embroidery, Paj Ntaub, and their remarkable craft and historic struggle is displayed in the large, detailed narrative wall pieces here. A large number of Hmong families still live in refugee camps waiting to leave a region not sympathetic with their political circumstances. Lou Vang’s “The Hmong Journey to Freedom,” condenses an elaborate series of events that plot time, strife, and ceremony in a spectacular story cloth from the 1980’s.

It’s appropriate to finish the show with Hmong art considering that these textiles are a not only records but part of a decades-old artifactual continuum whose stories have been constructed not from written texts but spoken word. These life documents are embattled textiles and part of a trans-national history that projects the volatility of place, identity and home. The Hmong’s endless migration also contributes to a larger recognition of American war history, and the interrelationships of our wider, conflicted history of immigration. Merge that with post-modern art and craft, our colonizing past, and the activist 1960’s from which a critical part of our popular culture is framed…..a suitable way to grasp the significance of home, which for too many is still a work in progress.

All exhibitions on display through Friday, August 29.  

Photographs by James Kreul