cover: SUSAN FENTON, White Gauze Mask (1996) hand painted gelatin silver print, 24" x 24" AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY Dawn Black - paintings Iona Rozeal Brown - prints Lynden Cline - sculpture Teri Cross Davis - poetry Bailey Doogan - drawings Susan Fenton - hand painted silver print photographs Inga McCaslin Frick - digital work Clarinda Harriss - poetry J.J. McCracken - performance Judith McCombs - poetry Ledelle Moe - sculpture Elsa Mora - photograph Elena Patino - painting Phyllis Plattner - painting Athena Tacha - sculpture and photo Rosemary Winslow - poetry curator MAY 8 – JUNE 27 2009 SCHOOL 33 ART CENTER “Masked” - The possibility of a managed presentation of self, of something hidden. Even when we are ruthless in baring all, that decision to be so present or vulnerable, so apparently guileless – is a self-conscious decision to be someone specific in the world – and that decision reveals as much as it conceals. (Or in the case of baring all…conceals as much as it reveals.) “Masked” could suggest a negative; that something is being self-consciously hidden. But when the moon masks the sun in a total solar eclipse, a sun of a different sort – the corona - magically appears. Each work in this selection, on its own, hides something and thereby reveals something else – powerfully. But, together, the sum is greater than the parts…something magical happens in this combination of work. Seen ensemble, it becomes clear that the base of each work is an uncompromised, powerful corona of humor, insight, questions and knowledge. Each work included is a performance piece of sorts; the artists have used their own bodies or their own biographies to very directly create presences that suggest stories or secrets. Rather than being a study in psychology or narrative, however where one might work to discover that secret – this assembly, is exciting in that as we experience the powerfully posited content on the surface, we know that there is an equally powerfully complex internal life. The clarity of that duality in these works is fascinating. CURATORS’ BIO JOAN WEBER, who with her husband Bruce, is an active collector of contemporary art produced in the Baltimore-Washington region and in Oracle, Arizona with pieces ranging from figurative and abstract to digital and conceptual. Ms. Weber is a member of ArtTable and is Vice President of the Washington Sculptors Group. In 2004, she curated "I Really Want to See. " at Gallery Four, in Baltimore, MD. Ms. Weber lives and works as a real estate professional in Silver Spring, Maryland. CURATOR’S STATEMENT About one year ago, in Bailey Doogan’s studio in Tucson, Arizona, I stood looking at her new large charcoal drawings Five Fingered Grin and Four Fingered Smile and listened to Bailey describe having gone through a deep depression for two years during which time she had not been able to work. She said that one day she had stood in front of her mirror and used her hands to manipulate her face to create affect. Bailey hired a portrait photographer to capture her now-rehearsed gestures, and produced a body of work, drawings and paintings around that experience. It occurred to me that I wanted to find other work that powerfully developed themes of the ways identities are created, hidden or revealed. Once I began that exploration, it became clear that masking, like an eclipse, often reveals as much as it conceals. So – this exhibit took shape: the powerful personal and introspective work of secrets, grief or celebration; the political and social pieces presenting layers of power struggles, history and community; and the performative and more formal work where the process of establishing identities right in front of us is the art object, itself. In some of the pieces, the secret is the story we work to uncover; in other pieces the process of creating the work is the enigma. Sculptor Lynden Cline’s work, for years, has been driven by her feelings of having been rejected by her birth mother. Her work, Soft Creamy Center, deals very directly with hidden information and secret places and then, in Self-Portrait, after learning of a life-changing event, Lynden’s pain spews out, the mask is off, the energy is more raw for having been controlled and contained. With Bound and its uneven wheels, the curving involuting spiraling fate is sealed. The photos of black and red masks by Elsa Mora had to be in this exhibit. Mora’s series, Perda de Sentido, (Loss of Reason) is frightening; the work is dark and dangerous and raises questions that we are not sure we want answered because they may be deeper and more troubling than we want to know. Her images, at first, were deeply troubling as if they were calling on awful demons. The work was generated by the suicide of a close friend of Mora’s, artist Belquis Ayon. The black mask represents that mysterious part of life that cannot be explained; the red mask represents life and the part of her friend that will always be alive in her. Knowing this did not diminish the sense of danger and mystery in the work; on living with these images, the confusion, pathos and tribute behind the masks became clear. The social and political aspect of identity is the subject of Iona Rozeal Brown who powerfully explores the phenomenon of Japanese young people who in an effort to be “cool” blackened their faces, permed their hair, and donned the garb of what they thought to be the African American hip-hop culture. Although as many fads, this may have passed, what remains is a broad based adoption of the music, CURATOR’S STATEMENT language and popularized lifestyle of hip-hop into contemporary Japanese culture. The cultural mixes that Iona’s work presents, with extraor- dinary color, humor and elegance reflect her witness of the complexity of choosing one’s own face – again, the creation of a social identity. Athena Tacha’s several Rape Patches, Breast Patch, and Chemotherapy Mask are part of a body of work Tacha did following the deaths from cancer of two of her closest friends and the rapes of some others. The illness or trauma each had gone through caused Tacha to explore our vulnerability as humans – to pain, loss or violation, and the ways that we think we can protect ourselves (the ways we mask the reality)– with our beliefs in medical treatments, preventative measures and, simply, by denial. But the fragility and porosity of the various types of armor shows how little we are protected. Wine Spine Shield which is the latest in a series of shields – is now more dense and angry, and aggressive, even. The gold leaf and oil altarpieces, Legends, by Phyllis Plattner, move the exhibition to the powerfully political and combine elements of two cultures - Mexican revolutionary and Italian Christian renaissance art. The ski-masked figures are depictions of actual small woolen dolls from Chiapas, Mexico representing the Zapatista guerilla warriors, made by Mayan women since the 1994 indigenous uprising there. As Plattner says, “At the same time that they are beautiful and appealing, they often depict imagery of violence, danger and threat.” She writes, further, “… they raise questions about the role of religion, history, depiction, myth, legend, and symbol in our understanding of our culture.” The Congregation by Ledelle Moe is a world of unique faces, a crowd. Are they masks? Are they individual people? Their massing tells a story that is at once both history (they appear old and weather-worn) and future (features emerging out of a crowd in the instant before they are particular; the clarity is yet to be). The Congregation is us as a community of fellows - present but anonymous. Dawn Black’s Conceal Project, uses “real” people culled from the Internet or various periodicals to explore the way in which as she says, “…masquerade allows the disguise wearer to be powerful through anonymity and to allow the concealed to be his or her authentic self.” But what do we know of the powerlessness and the defined vulnerability of the hooded prisoner? Of the glamorized ladies? Of the clown? They are all existentially present in Black’s world just mixed in this grid without rhyme or reason – but aren’t we all there anyway? The performative work of J.J. McCracken involves creating living sculptures of actors coated in clay who become their pose or task. With a limited number or range of props – the vignette, a cellist playing a composition of her own and the artist’s making, who then listens to it played back in reverse, who then plays a composition of her own and the artist’s making, who then listens to it played back, in reverse. The CURATOR’S STATEMENT performer builds a whole world. The clay mask on the performer and on the cello and on the vignette dries and cracks adding to the physical and emotional tension of the piece. Me by Others, Others by Me, a performance piece by Elena Patino takes work done of matching skin color into a new and interactive direction. On 20 separate appointments, Patino invited an “other” to join her in her studio for a painting exercise in which they would each mix paint to match, and then paint wood panels, with what each viewed to be their own and other’s skin color in that studio, in that light that day. For each visit by a particular “other” then, there are four painted panels – two painted by Elena and two by the “other.” This is documentation where we see, graphically recorded, the distortions (by whom is irrelevant) in how people visually perceive themselves and others.