Art Critic’s Review

Carolina’s Got Art!

By Scott Lucas

No one likes losing pieces of his cultural landscape.  Twenty years ago gallery owner Larry Elder lost a piece of his with the disappearance of the Springs Mills art exhibit in Rock Hill, SC. For thirty years Springs Mills was the only open invitational juried art venue showcasing talent from across the Carolinas. The show shuttered in 1990. Elder had been annually juiced by exposure to the works of hitherto unseen regional artists, and he was disheartened when the show closed down. The loss of that cultural tradition left a hole in Elder’s personal visual landscape and a hole in the regional art market. That light had gone out.

Elder turned it back on. Carolina’s Got Art! was Elder’s response to the black hole left with the loss of the Springs show. He figured he could transplant the notion to Charlotte. Had he foreseen the struggle required before he committed to this venture, he may never have brought this show to fruition. Normally a measured and thoughtful man, Elder temporarily took leave of his senses. Those of us who have seen the show are thankful he did.  The Springs show spirit was reborn with the juried show Elder put together at the former Design Center at Atherton Mill in Charlotte.

He sent out invites to the show, reaching out to institutions in North and South Carolina to announce the invitational. He had space to hang 130 pieces; he expected maybe 400 images for review. He received 1,122. Elder brought in accomplished artist, art writer and critic Brice Brown from New York to jury the show. The man had his work cut out for him.

I must admit I am skeptical of this kind of show. An open invitation to every artist in the Carolinas? Sounds a little like American Idol with a cast of six million. I walked in with a cocked eyebrow and steeled gut – I’ve seen no-holds-barred invitational shows which have set me to weeping. I held my breath on entry. Shame on me.  I love being proved unduly cynical. The artwork hung in the airy Design Center on 12 foot walls under 20 foot ceilings. Plenty of walk room, plenty of space between the pieces, and plenty of light. Each piece was accompanied by the artist’s statement, written in their own words, no edits apparent. The artists wrote about their process and materials, or their inspiration for the work. Very little theory. Thank you, Jesus.

Taylor Grocery, Oxford, Miss was a painting by Martha Moore from Shelby, NC. Taylor Grocery is a worn out catfish joint, with cracked brick and windows burned black, abandoned and baking in the Mississippi sun. Moore took pains to get each detail right, from the handwritten advertisement on the ancient gas pump, “eat or we both starve,” to the crumpled tin roof covering the warped and weather worn front porch. Moore’s painting captured something now lost to progress and interstate homogeneity; a place of “Aw shucks, we just family, c’mon in.” A place without a sanitation rating, cast aside, quaint and forgotten. Taylor Grocery has been left on the soft shoulder of nostalgia. Something more than catfish lost there.

Ashlynn Browning is an Abstract Expressionist painter. This style has gone underground. I rarely see it anymore. Browning carries the torch well. Her painting is lush and primal, impulsive and a bit unsettling. In her painting Onward and Upward, Browning embraced that spirit once embraced by the untethered American beast of Abstract Expressionism. “My goal is to strike a balance of structure and accident, restraint and recklessness, deliberation and instinct. This resonates with me as being truthful.” From a ground of gray/green, strokes of white and charcoal rushed and tumbled down the face of the painting, brown scumbled gestures scared the bottom face, and acrobatic red calligraphy laced the top, describing that difficult-to-grip space between “restraint and recklessness.” Browning paints the messy, inexorable language of longing.

Gateway was a painting by Karen Crandall Simpson of Charlotte. It was built, stitched and composed of canvas burlap and linen strips with paint stains, glazes and graphite. Her white, black and red canvas was architectural, built up, tactile, crafted and robust. She wove together elements of constructivist Russian revolution posters, Italian futurism and quilt making in her assembly. Fabric was stitched and pasted to the surface. The stitching was heavy and strident and rustic – faux inelegant, like Frankenstein’s neck stitching. The architecture of her language was terse, staccato and urgent. Shapes were emphatic – they strutted on the surface. Her work is rough, elemental and elegant, like a panther, a waterfall or the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.

Minus One was by Chris Wallace from Waxhaw, NC. This assemblage was the first work the man completed following the death of his 20 year old son. Wallace wrote about “experiencing anger, guilt, doubts of faith and uncertainties of the future” during the period following his son’s death.  A silhouette of a boy’s torso was veiled in a checkerboard wash of paint. He is armless, a hole is opened just right of his sternum, and next to the boy, a figure from a tarot card, “Il Penduto,” hangs upside down from one foot. A shard of worn plywood hangs by twine from the base of the piece; a figure is wrapped and bound to the board as if readied for the pyre. The piece was grave. It elicited the tongue-in-the-throat thickness felt from a personal tragedy, and conveyed the silent howl which leaves no reverberations in the world outside our own head.

Best of Show was won by Jon Wald of Charlotte. Crash Boot Camp was an exploding iMac computer. Wald’s inspiration bloomed from his “uh-oh” experience when his computer crashed.  It was all plastic casing, circuit boards, aluminum armatures, and copper innards lurching off the wall. The exploding pieces were held in check by nuts, threaded rods and carriage bolts. Translucent, pink and cobalt blue casings formed the hard plastic, lightweight bulk of the piece. Wald’s assembly was backlit with spiral florescent bulbs embedded within the plastic shrapnel. It was luminous and comic, and brought me back to the days of my own iMac, which I imagined might really do this if I hit the wrong stroke. Crash Boot Camp was either a metaphor for the relentless addictive dance with the cool gadget which has enslaved us, or the most fabulous wall sconce I’ve ever seen.

According to my eyes, Stephanie Neely painted the best painting in the show. Resurrection was a single rose bloom perched in a tall glass half filled with water. It was both substance and non-substance. It was luminous. The lower petals relaxed over the rim of the glass, unfolding. The upper petals remained loosely cupped, slightly curled at the edges, doubling the skin and allowing little light penetration; they were a darker opaque bloody vermillion. The single petals exposed fully to the light were translucent and they glowed.   Three horizontal bands of muted color formed the background and the table under the glass. Straight lines were fuzzy; water, stems and leaves distorted. Neely revealed the simple, small and insubstantial as luminous and elegant and significant. It’s like she was telling me, “Hey, this is how mystics see everything.”

Lady Pouring Milk by David Benson was a four foot square painting, an amalgamation of many sketchbook “doodles” layered on transparent fields, image on image, lapped between tinted layers. The result was a rich encaustic field of hands and feet and heads, arrows, hair and beards, lampposts, lace necklaces, chickens, snakes and toes. The random drawn images merged from a two pace step back into all-over canvas, from goofy chaos to coherence once the painting pushes you back to its appropriate proximity zone.

Most striking about this show was the unexpected quality of most of the work. There were few clunkers to my eye. There was skill – good eyes, invention and deft hands – and sometimes all of those talents conspire to make something marvelous. There was no pretention or carelessness or false intimations of grandeur; none of the benchmark qualities of hobbyist. The word amateur doesn’t apply.

Carolina’s Got Art!, like its predecessor at Springs Mills, was a regional cultural movement offering affordable fare for the Carolina masses. The show was a testimony to the unseen talent out there burbling invisibly like lava in the foothills and under our sidewalks. This quiet eruption attests to that subterranean substance only a risky show like this can expose. Let’s hope this new piece of our cultural landscape becomes an annual tradition.