BEAUTIFUL PROXY

 

By Greg Rideout

Going into Lump Gallery on the last day of “BEAUTIFUL PROXY”, a one-woman show by mixed media artist Jasmine Best, reminded me why I started looking at art all those years ago. I like being surprised and alarmed. I like feeling that I’m seeing something different, works that push up under the normal to twist me and pull me into new thoughts.

 

Here, with Jasmine Best, I’m seeing the artist’s life in complicated nuances as she seeks her footing in place and time. There’s sad beauty in “Mouth Piece”, a collaged fabric and digital painting that’s a flag-like anthem for suffering and inclusion. It’s somehow angry and hopeful at the same time. Its colorful composition directly confronts us, and the anxious young woman portrayed points her accusing silence directly at you.

 

The enigmatic “Self Portrait 2020 Check In”, so lovingly layered and composed, gives us a glimpse of Best’s own story and asks us to check on ours. What is true and what is false about the narrative we’ve created for our selves and others? It’s a gift to be asked such questions.

 

Best’s works spring from being Black and female in predominantly white Southern spaces. She confronts that space and each of us with her “A Wilmington Doll”  -- a color video in which a Black female in blonde wig and blue contacts holds a white doll painted black.  The video portrait stares, daring and angry and brave. The narration –repeated again and again – flatly intones “all the world had agreed” that blue and white were desirable above all else. The work reminds us of the almost impossible task of repairing the evil damage wrought on all by white supremacy.

 

I hope you will go to Best’s website to see the pieces.  And look for other shows of her work. Perhaps you’ll see how she handles the placement of Black female bodies in our society, where they are expected to work and labor. She does with the gouache and digital prints of  “American Weeds Growing Through Docile Garden (Nubian Queen)” and “American Green Growing Through Docile Garden (Uppity).” With these and other works, Best constructs what good art does at times – gives us a window into others and ourselves.

ambiguous space: conversations with truth

By Greg Rideout

Uncovered meanings hide in plain view in “Ambiguous Space: Conversations With Truth”, the compelling November show on view at the Pullen Arts Center. From the elegant, mournful beauty of Gerry Lynch’s “Kabul” to Richard Marshall’s transformative “Transient”, there’s much to see in the paintings by four of Raleigh’s eminent, and enigmatic, painters. Marshall and Lynch join Ashlynn Browning and Georges Le Chevallier to offer viewers a variety of second looks, where colors chosen and lines marked unleash new joys and age-old meanings. Together, the works here succinctly capture moments of truth, all asking a version of the question: Am I who you think I am? There are many answers, and each hopes to find a space in the viewer’s heart. Look for them in the layers of reimagined materials pulsing from the works on display by these four local masters.

THE ARTISTS

Gerry Lynch 

Emerging from lyrical abstracts, Lynch’s works here underscore her ability to find universal beauty in our dizzying world. Lynch’s fifty years of releasing art into the ether lingers behind the two distinct “Kabul” paintings on display here, both combining outlined images and Arabic script fragments to probe connections over space and time. As Lynch remembers, "It was a white plate with black calligraphy - a 10th century bowl with Arabic inscription from Iran which I first saw at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art decades ago - that ignited my use of calligraphic lines in my work.” For viewers, her insights from that day gave way to a multitude of insightful paintings. Lynch releases mournful beauty into the rooms where her art lives, each canvas offering a playful wink at the serendipity that befalls all humans.

Richard Marshall 

Marshall, whose career includes paintings, collages and videos that challenge the viewer to escape from everyday thinking, offers up three paintings that seem born from a void. “When human perception slides against external reality, thought bubbles and I wonder how to portray that,” Marshall says. Here, complicated ideas become simple, courtesy of skillful brush strokes and imaginative juxtapositions. “Transient” brings blue-white skies glimpsed between geometric forms. Then, a shadowed figure emerges from speckled green/yellows and dabbed blues. It’s a plea to our humanity. Look at me, even though I am not here, the figure implores. Marshall masterfully musters an ambiguous emergence, a figure who confronts us – but in our time of peril, not hers. Is the figure you or me? Is she real or haunting, respected or ignored? The answer lies within plane/plain view.

Georges Le Chevallier

Le Chevallier’s work in this exhibition requires a double take. Is what you say you are giving me what you are giving me? There’s a transubstantiation taking place. Le Chevallier turns sustenance into soul. Here, art solves the tension between symbol and thought. With “Tamarind Glazed Oxtails” and “Yellowtail Sashimi with Jalapeñ-o”, the adroit framing becomes a ritualistic plating on which Le Chevallier’s art lies. The food-like figures play, their beauty dancing in the light air of the surrounding blank canvas. Like other pieces from his long and productive career, Le Chevallier throws out the rules and creates ideas worth lingering over. “I develop mixed media paintings of specific food dishes from various cultures that I simplify to symbolic visual elements aiming to create an abstract ‘molecular gastronomy’ rooted in meditation and based on the plating practices of the culinary arts,” Le Chevallier says. That idea bursts off the canvas, a reification that nourishes the soul. 

Ashlynn Browning 

Browning builds her work intuitively, in layers of pure abstract forms. Filled with colors and shapes, the works ask viewers to experience them, first, wordlessly; to feel them as synesthesia. Then, our brains start to peel back the layers, to see the hidden spaces of emotions. “The forms in the paintings often function as stand-ins for figures, each one exhibiting its own personality and implied psychological narrative,” Browning says. “The many layers in the paintings speak not only to the history of their creation, but also to the concealed parts of ourselves that we hold back. Windows into under layers reveal hidden depths and untold stories.” Browning constructs her paintings like sculpture, placing form on form until she understands its completeness. They are released into the world to find us. Here, viewers can delve and see the process in one such painting, "A Light Shines in the Dark." By digging through the layers, we reveal not just the personality of the painting, but our own layers. We see the truth both in front of us and within.