EKH: This project, called Ya Kala Ben, was shot in your mother’s home country of Guinea Conakry. How does the idea of origins and heritage influence your work?
NL: For the last few years, my research has been focused on African identity through Western eyes. All I knew before the trip was that my mother is Muslim and that my father is Protestant, although I’ve not been baptized. The religious aspect of my mother’s country became very prominent. I discovered an animist side to the Guinean culture which is based on people’s respect for nature. I had been exposed to the supernatural part of Guinea since I was a child, had visited ‘marabouts’ (a type of witch doctor), and this time around I took part in many ceremonies and rituals. It enabled me to feel more aware of the existence and the intricacies of a world parallel to ours, the world of spirits. The art of photography allows me to exteriorize my emotions and my past, telling my story through different shots, in some kind of syncretism.

EKH: Many of the objects you use in your images are considered sacred. How did your models feel about the customs, the postures, and you photographing them?
NL: They would become serious and quiet. They were stressed most of the time because they were not used to being models. They knew what they were representing, and they knew they had to respect the holy tools. That is why I had to work very quickly all the time. When I got ready to shoot, I did not waste time, because my human models were recreating something holy and many times they felt uneasy. Sometimes I had to deal with violent reactions from Guineans who viewed my practices and procedures as a form of sacrilege.

EKH: Where is your imagery coming from, especially something like Statuette Ndobi? The figure seems to be twisted, pregnant, and imprisoned in those wood sticks. Could you please tell me more about that image, the symbols, the historical issues behind it, and your intentions with it?
NL: In this work, I was interested in the construction and deconstruction of the body as well as the depiction of the invisible. I have studied ritual artefacts common to the cosmology of Guineans; statuettes that are part of a ceremonial structure. They are from another world, they are the roots of the living. Thereby, I sought to touch the untouchable.

I traveled through Guinea and observed different rituals and ceremonies to create my series. I went to many places to find the ones I was looking for and to choose the right models. I am particularly interested in fetishes. The myths, the force of nature, and the deep, intuitive, impulsive culture of Africa offer me a lot of creative inspiration. My approach is to separate those sacred statuettes from their religious context in order to immortalize them in a Western framework.

Ya Kala Ben in Malinke dialect means crossed look. There are statuettes in my photographs, but in the statuettes, the humans are still exist. The final image is always layered and it shows not only the picture but what is behind it historically, religiously, and my experience as well. Statuette Ndobi is a fetish statuette. I put in her some medicine, magic words, and things that belong to me. I created my own ritual doing all my statuettes and I became the feticheur who could animate them with my mind.

EKH: How was your experience of reconnecting with your origins? What was it that surprised you the most?
NL: I have always wanted to explore and share the African culture that is part of me. I knew that the best way to do it was to visit the village founded by my great grandfather. This pilgrimage to the land of some of my ancestors inevitably raised the sensitive question of “origin” or “origins;” mine, that of my parents, of others (my subjects), and of my approach.

What surprised me the most was the pace at which people in Guinea got things done. Everything took a long time. I found myself wasting a day waiting for people to show up. I took off my watch in order to be able to relate and learn how to work at the Guinean space. The systematic lateness of models posed some technical problems, for instance the changing of light during the day, as at certain times it becomes harder to photograph.

EKH: You write, that the “photographic eye … makes [the objects] speak differently” on your website. What is it that a viewer—unfamiliar with Guinean cosmology—will understand from your work?
NL: These objects are part of a collective. They must not be separated from it without the risk of losing their value. They are not the gods of this community but their prayers. They are integrated in a rigorous symbolic order where every component has its place. They are ritual tools that I have animated by staging live models and, in a way, desecrated them by giving them another meaning; an unfamiliar meaning in the Guinean context. In reconstructing these sacred objects through the lens, I brought them in a framework meant for Western aesthetic choices and taste. I analyze myself through the lens of my camera and I constantly question myself—which is very challenging. It is like capturing an image. I travel from a spiritual ground to get to the plasticity of the picture. For me, spirituality is tradition; plasticity is modernism.

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Herod is dancing in Chambliss Giobbi’s Tanz für mich, Salome!, inspired by Richard Strauss’ very modern opera based on the Oscar Wilde play Salome. Giobbi loved the music but has turned the story around and made Herod the one dancing. This collage is filled with the image of an aging, overweight, almost naked man full of faults. He is incestuous, adulterous, and on his way to seduce his stepdaughter. For this image Giobbi used his own body as a model—a brave thing to do, since Herod is anything but handsome.

Herod is dancing. His expensive robe is open, showing most of his naked body. His head, arms, and legs all have multiple images, as Giobbi uses this “cubistic” method to capture movement. The two heads betray Herod’s indulgence with food and wine. In Wilde’s play Herod invites Salome to “Dip into it thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup” and, “bite but a little of this fruit, that I may have what is left” but Salome refuses. Herod still drinks the wine and eats everything else too. In Giobbi’s image we see the remains of red wine and food all over his face. He’s reached a point of drunkenness when reason is no longer bothering him. He touches his right head in a moment of recognition of his madness but he can’t stop dancing just now. Jewels cover his body. All of his fingers are richly ringed. One of his fingernails is badly bitten. He has worries. Metal necklaces surround his body like snakes.

Giobbi was a composer of classical music before he turned to visual arts. As he said, in music “time contains every move we make, everything exists in time, develops over time. I love the idea behind cubism. I love the brutality of it, the honest kind of brutality of it. These are like getting multiple moments of time; doing the direct opposite of (music), like compressing multiple moments in one cathartic image.” In the way that music is composed of single notes, Giobbi’s collages are created from thousands of little pieces. He takes portraits of his models, sometimes as many as 300 images, from different perspectives, enlarges them on the computer (but doesn’t modify them) prints them, and then cuts them into small pieces in order to create his compositions. He uses boards as a base and covers the finished work with a thin layer of beeswax to keep the pieces in place and so they will also “smell good.”

However fascinating his method is, Giobbi’s main focus is the character of his models, “I look for people with a free spirit and strong character; who stand for what they do with great conviction and passion.” This search often leads him to well-known personalities such as artists Joe Barnes and Alice O’Malley, filmmaker Fisher Stevens, performance artist Penny Arcade, or cult figures such as Indian Larry, the Chopper Shaman, or the transgender Amanda Lepore. Modeling for Giobbi is a commitment, since it takes about a year until he reaches the point that he knows them really well and feels that he can get into their skin, or more likely under their skin. That’s when he finally gets to the actual work. When there’s no secret left, he recreates the person in his work not as an idealized version but the “full truth.”

At first sight, you can see that Fisher Stevens is a nice guy, someone you would love to have a drink with. He seems to be a big dreamer whose head is in the clouds, surrounded by the artistic haze of cigarette smoke, while he tells sophisticated and funny stories about the characters he brings into life in his films. Stevens is an accomplished film persona with many movies to his credit including Short Circuit, Hackers, his documentary The Cove and his debut as the director of Stand Up Guys. When he talks about his work his favourite words are, “it was so much fun” or an “amazing experience.” Giobbi got him absolutely right: a nice, amazing, funny person.

Herod is not the only one who is dancing in Giobbi’s compositions. The photographer, Alice O’Malley chooses her models from New York’s club culture, and always strips them down in order to recreate them in blinding whiteness. Inspired by this method Giobbi stripped down O’Malley as she dances in the collages depicting her. There is a lot of stripping down and nakedness in Giobbi’s works. His images of the seven deadly sins (Se7n) are embodiments of unfortunate passions that are pregnant with many evils. They show the aesthetics of the morbid, its cruelty and its beauty. In the collage Pride transgender celebrity Amanda Lepore is dancing in front of a mirror. In their need for exposure Giobbi’s models become overexposed and sometimes too naked, making the viewers into voyeurs.

Herod is still dancing in his Dionysian haze. Does he really dance for Salome? I don’t think so. His dance is no longer filled with desire but becomes a bottomless pit of lust, a burning itch, more like a disease than a pleasure. It is greed that moves him, wanting more and more, never to be satisfied. This modern version of Herod is being consumed by his own needs. Giobbi’s characters are unmasked guests at the masquerade of our times, and his Herod, this overfed, oversexed antihero, leads this mad cavalcade.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos

The post Flesh Collage: The Work of Chambliss Giobbi appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Wandering around and slightly bored on a Saturday afternoon, I found myself at Katzman-Kamen Gallery in Toronto. There I saw a large photograph depicting a young woman with skin painted white holding a strange metal wire form in front of her face. It was an unsettling portrait with elements that didn’t belong together. Then in 2012, NY Arts Magazine included a similar image in its list of young artists to be watched. Meryl McMaster was young, talented and seemed to have a unique imagery at her disposal.

In Toronto’s CONTACT 2013, she had a solo show, titled In-Between Worlds, which honored her mixed background. Both of her parents are from Saskatchewan; her father is Plains Cree and her mother is of British, Scottish, and Dutch heritage. “This always caused conflict for me and posed a challenge in presenting them as a synergistic strength, not as a struggle between opposites.” said McMaster.

Identity has been the central theme in her art from the beginning. The Second Self series (2010-11) reconsiders portraiture by incorporating drawing and sculpture into the photographic image to evoke a world that is not normally seen. McMaster was influenced by New York Times illustrator Saul Steinberg’s work Le Masque, and especially by his idea that everyone wears masks, either real or metaphorical. The head is the embodiment of our self-perception and is often misrepresented. McMaster wanted to show the real and the masked self of a person in one image. She asked friends to draw blind-contour portraits of themselves. Then, using wire, she created sculptures that were exact replicas of these drawings. She painted her models’ faces white, to make them “naked,” and suspended the blind-contour wire versions in front of them. In this way she created dualistic images, which appear confrontational and challenging while at the same time light-hearted and playful.

In In-Between Worlds McMaster focused her interest on historical and tribal identity in order to express her mixed heritage through different symbols. In Brumal Tattoo, she constructed a sculptural, armor-like garment of pinecones. The figure is beating a large drum. Historically, Europeans used “field music” to control troops on the battlefield as well as for entertainment. In Native Canadian culture, the beating of a drum represents the beating heart and the soul. The braided, many different patterned fabrics show the merging of her two ancestries. “Brumal” means wintery and “Tattoo” means either a signal sounded on a drum or a permanent mark on the skin. The sound and vibrations leave patterns depicted in red paint splattered on the landscape and on the body. For McMaster it is a tattoo of the past, present, and future.

Nature is a great influence on McMaster. From her teenage years on she has been exploring and working in Canada’s remote natural landscapes. As part of these trips everyone had to learn to survive by going through a “solo” experience in which they were left by themselves with only a little food and shelter supplies for 3 days. For McMaster it meant not only being bored because she was not allowed to bring anything with her (eg. a book or music) but she was also scared at times as her imagination ran wild listening to all the forest noises, especially at night. “Following the struggle of seclusion, I began to feel a sense of empowerment. It was these moments of being both in the group, as well as alone in such a harsh foreign environment that profoundly affected me and changed how I see the world.” said McMaster. Reflecting on this experience, she discovered many similarities to the vision quest in which Plains Cree youth go out alone into the wilderness, and, through a combination of isolation and fasting, try to find themselves and their life direction.

Some of the photographs in In-Between Worlds are a further embodiment of this transformation. She gave the images dream-like qualities as she remembered odd and unexplainable situations from her “solo” experience. In Terra Cognitum, the concentric circles depict a topographic map overlaid on the artist’s body and on the ground representing the colonization of the land and McMaster’s connection to it. The small colorful seed beads she used were part of traditional Cree clothing as well as currency during the colonial period. She intentionally left out sections of the map to reference her ongoing exploration of herself.

All the images are “staged” photographs. While photography is McMaster’s primary medium, she often incorporates other artistic media, including sculpture. This synergy creates a surreal, augmented imagery. In-Between Worlds was photographed in Ottawa in the middle of winter using natural light. McMaster is the model in all of these photographs. As she explained, “I inserted my own body into visual spaces that reflected both the inspiration I felt from my time alone in nature as well as the concept of being ‘betwixt.’”

McMaster’s stories might have their roots in both native and colonial tales but in the end she dreams up hybrid heroes. Then she gets into their skins, dances with the spirits, and creates her own myths.

By Emese Krunak-Hajagos

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Stepping into Red Head Gallery we come face to face with a combination of nerve and wit, a painting of a large dark tunnel that seems ready to swallow us. Above it is a landscape with a bridge and greenery while in the top left corner the image of a bull breaks the peace. But we don’t spend too much time looking at nature as our gaze keeps returning to the tunnel. It is so dark and forbidding but somehow mesmerizing as well. A sculpture of a young hooded girl stands behind a rail and stares into the darkness, maybe trying to decide whether to enter or keep away. The exhibition poster shows a different version of this installation where a boy squats on his skateboard in a suspended moment of indecision. It’s not a question of seeing the “end of the tunnel” at this point as it’s so far away. The boy is all the way at this end and has to decide whether to move into it at all. It is a very scary depiction of starting your adult life and it’s understandable that the young person’s reaction seems rather passive.

The corner piece titled A Momentary Decision of Monumental Significance has two large red panels and a smaller, blue one, plus a sculpture, a projector and a video. In one panel we see a deer and behind it a bloody carcass that might be its future. In the opposite panel a man is posing as a bourgeois family patriot—someone important. The hunter and the hunted are looking at each other from one panel to the other. The sculpture of a young girl faces the man. Her head is covered by a hood and she’s holding some brochures—maybe handouts against animal cruelty. In her other hand is a large flag with a forest bridge projected on it.

Gillian Iles, A Momentary Decision of Monumental Significance, 2013. Triptych, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 78 x 66, 72 x 16, 78 x 54 in, with video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can the generation gap between these two figures—between past and future—be bridged, or it is just an illusion like the projected image? Maybe the bridge is there so the deer can avoid a grisly fate.

A pack of lions are fighting in the corner of a large painting titled A Combination of Cunning, Speed and Astonishing Grace. Their sudden movement is in strong contrast to the heavy stillness of the futuristic building towering over them. Most likely the land with its sandy colors originally belonged to the animals even if they seem to be alienated from it now. This composition includes two sculptures of youngsters, one with the face of a lion on the back of its head, and the other, a wolf. Iles mentioned that she often uses animals as metaphors to show the characteristics of a group or to signify what might become of those children as adults. Will these two become fighters for the environment or will they just tear each other apart in social conflicts?

Sculptures of fragile young figures fill the room and they are often the protagonists of Iles’ paintings as well. She is looking at the social disruption that teenagers face these days and their body language as a clue to figuring out their response. Many of the youngsters wear hoodies to protect their fragile identity. Some of them turn their back to us unready to face the challenges we represent. As Iles says in her artist statement,

“The world of youth on the cusp of adolescence is a closed and inaccessible environment of mysterious rituals, customs and codes of behaviour that are unintelligible to outsiders. Sculptural elements have been added which work in tandem with, and react to the paintings, creating a physical void between the subjects and the object of their desire and repulsion. The figures stand tentatively on the cusp of awareness of their potential and the abyss of the adult prerogative.”

This exhibition is not for the frail of heart. It is a brave show with a strong message about environmental issues as well as the challenges that every generation faces when replacing the previous one. They want to be better. Hopefully they still have a chance to save our environment and define a morality that supports and respects us all. It won’t be easy for them while adults are always saying, “That’s not how we do things here”—the title of Iles’ previous show.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos

redheadgallery.org

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