Savannah
Ferrell
A485
Contemporary Art
Revised Exhibition
Review
12 October 2017
The Canyon: 1999-2017
Spanning from 1999 to 2017, the body of work from
Caledonia Curry aka “Swoon” is enchanting, endearing, and sublime. The Canyon, her exhibition at the
Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati opened on September 22, 2017 with an
overwhelming turnout. The Canyon displays
Curry’s first ever retrospective exhibition, visiting sections of her art
career from the very beginning to the present. It highlights her career in
specific sections throughout the exhibition. First is work from her early
years, when she studied at the Pratt Institute, made woodblock and linocut
prints from anonymous portraits of street-goers, and worked as a wheatpaste street
artist. Then the viewer is brought to her middle years where she began to use
portraits of people she knew and brought more personal meaning and pain into
her body of work. Finally, the viewer comes to her later projects where she
worked (and continues to work) primarily in community outreach programs, global
ventures for human rights and civic revitalization in addition to her gallery
shows. In this way, this retrospective really shows how Curry has grown from a
student-artist, interested mainly in observing and recreating, to a
professional artist interested in making change in the world using her art.
This exhibition is separated into several different
installations. The first floor is a chronological timeline from her earliest
work as an art student to her more intimate works. The second floor houses her collaborative
and global works. This setup makes for a very successful retrospective show
because it guides viewers in a logical sense and allows them to get to know the
artist and her body of work. The first section of this timeline is called Time Capsule. (Curry, 1999-2017) This
installation takes up about three quarters of the first floor in the exhibition,
is then split into four chronologically respective sections, and spans from the
year 1999 to the present. The entire installation is made up of her work
wheatpasted directly onto the walls, mirroring the street art technique that
she has worked with since the beginning of her career. There are parts of an
early raft project that she built in collaboration with other artists that are
re-constructed into the gallery space to represent those early collaborative
works and to allow for more space to paste work on. (Figure 1) She and her collaborators
made these rafts out of garbage and used them to sail down the Hudson River,
demonstrating that you can do a lot with reused and recycled items.
The
quality of her work is impeccable. Her wheatpasted figures are surrounded by
intricate paper cutouts and wallpapers displaying the detail Curry places in
her work. She chose to display linoleum and wood blocks in certain spaces and
viewers are free to touch them. The attention to detail in her carvings is just
astounding. She works in a very sketchy, line-driven fashion, giving her
figures an added dimension of depth and life. This coupled with the intricate
patterns adorning her figures demonstrate her raw talent as an artist.
Curry’s
earliest work was made from sketches and photographs of people she saw in the
street that caught her attention. She worked from people she saw in the subway,
people she saw in other countries, but (usually, save for her first ever
full-length figure which was her grandfather) never people that she knew
personally. She wanted to capture something special in these anonymous people,
and to cross-section them with the cityscapes that she saw them in. Most of her
figures from this time have structures built into the bottom portions of their
bodies, and they are full-size and positioned at floor level to create an
intimate experience with the figure. (Figure 1) These people bring urban spaces
to life because they are the life of the city. The next parts of Time Capsule show Curry growing into her
shoes as an artist more. She chooses more intimate subjects and themes such as
friends of hers and later includes painful personal memories of abuse and
addiction in her family, which is explored in detail in other sections of the
exhibition. At the end of this installation,
Curry injects global meaning into her work with Thalassa. (2011) This piece is
a huge-scale modernized portrait of the mythological being from Aesop’s
fable, “The Farmer and the Sea,” commenting on humanity’s complacency in the
earth’s destruction. For this reason, Thalassa
can be seen as a monument in the show’s timeline representing Curry’s
movement into work that is more involved in the preservation and sustainment of
the community, locally and globally.
On the second floor of the exhibition viewers can see
Curry’s community-based work and collaborative projects with artists around the
world. Curry is a very active person globally, working with people around the
world to revitalize their communities using art. Many of these projects involve
teaching individuals or communities how to make art for funding and providing
art therapy programs for people affected by tragedies such as rape and
addiction. The projects affect people from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Meru,
Kenya to Lund, Sweden. In 2015, Curry founded the Heliotrope Foundation, a
non-profit organization aimed at helping people who have been affected by
natural or social disaster. This organization works in a few different ongoing
projects, including Konbit Shelter.
“Konbit,”
is a word describing a traditional form of cooperative labor in Haiti where
able-bodied people help others with their farming. This project was initiated
in 2010 after the devastating earthquake with the goal of providing
disaster-resistant shelter and long-standing community and global bonds. Curry
joined a group of artists, engineers, architects, educators and the community
of Cormiers, Haiti (Komye) to build shelters in the Super-Adobe style,
developed by Nadir Khalili to be completely earthquake, tornado, flood, and
fire resistant. The team shared new skills with each other and created new jobs
in the community, promoting education and productivity. Curry and her fellow
artists and community members decorated their shelters with art that they made,
echoing her original figures and patterns. The shelters themselves are 10%
concrete and 90% earth, making them eco-friendly as well. This project has
since developed into a long-standing relationship between communities as the
group has returned and worked with them. Konbit Shelter has also created a
clean stove project, partnered with local craftspeople to sell their art for
funding and additional housing construction using bamboo, and started an
arts-based afterschool program for children ages 3-18 in Cormiers. Curry shows
the fruits of the Konbit labor through an installation on the second floor, simply
called Konbit (2010-ongoing) Konbit is made up of models of the
structures, photographs mounted on the wall showing the work process and the
people involved, a video screen with headphones documenting the process and a
bound artist book of printed photographs from the project. (Figures 2-3)
The Canyon is very successful in showing
Callie Curry’s growth as an artist. It clearly shows her emerging as a
primitive artist, observing and copying, making anonymous portraits and working
mainly in the street, to making works of her friends and memories, painful or
not, and working on huge, collaborative and humanitarian projects such as her
early raft projects and her later Konbit Shelter initiative. The quality of her
work only grows too, as her sketchiness remains but becomes more refined and
clarified in her later works. She works with more colors and patterns now than
she used to, and it is clear to me that she feels more comfortable and
established in her art now than she did when she started, which is probably why
she does so much outreach work. Overall, this exhibition was stimulating,
interesting, and even overwhelming to see in person. Curry’s subject matter
spans such a large field and her work is done on such a detailed and huge
scale. It will always be exciting to see what she does next.
Figure 1 Callie Curry, Section of Time Capsule, 1999-2017,
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
|
Figures 2-3 Callie Curry, Konbit, 2010-ongoing,
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
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