FAITH, HOPE AND CONFLICT: PHOTOGRAPHIC SHOWS AT WATERWORKS HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF RELIGION AND SECTARIANISM
by Tom Patterson, Winston-Salem Journal, March 9, 2008
SALISBURY--Photographic mediums and a focus on issues related to religion are the common elements among three solo exhibitions on view at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center.
The first of these shows visible to viewers entering the center is Salisbury photojournalist Sean Meyers’ “The Faith Experience,” a series of color and black-and-white photographs documenting religious life in the state’s PIedmont . It highlights the variety and international character of religious traditions practiced in the region at the outset of the 21st century.
Several of Meyers’ photos zero in tightly on individuals praying or meditating, and one of them captures a scene in which a group of Christians join hands to form a “prayer circle.” There’s also a close-up of an elderly woman’s hands as she works at crafting a small Christian cross out of blue ribbon. The fervent physicality of charismatic Christianity is exemplified in Meyers’ black-and-white shot of a pastor dramatically sermonizing at a freewill Baptist church. The image captures the Rev. Tommy Long clasping a well-thumbed Bible to his chest and leaping off the carpeted floor so that neither of his feet touch it.
Christian religious practices in the Piedmont are otherwise documented in Meyers’ photos of a tent revival, a Moravian love feast, a dramatized crucifixion scene from a Passion Play and a close-up of mischievous-looking young Episcopalean acolytes, among other images.
A number of Meyers’ photographs, though, highlight non-Christian religious practices. One of them shows Muslim men prostrate on their prayer rugs, aligned in close formation and facing eastward toward Mecca. Another depicts an orange-robed, Cambodian Buddhist monk or priest lighting candles on an elaborate, tiered altar bearing a number of variously sized, crosslegged Buddha effigies.
The show adds up to an effective photojournalistic essay that aspires to art status, as indicated by the stretched-canvas surfaces on which its images are printed, instead of on the customary photographic paper. Nonetheless, it still looks like photojournalism.
In adjoining galleries at the Waterworks are Sandra Russell Clark’s black-and-white photographs of tombstones and other monuments in cemeteries in New Orleans, which make up her traveling show titled “Elysium: A Gathering of Souls.” A dreamy pictorialism prevails in these slightly soft-focus views of above-ground tombs, stone or concrete crosses and statues of angels and noble-looking figures.
Religious themes relating to the afterlife are overshadowed by the overtly romantic quality of these images, which are augmented by Clark’s informative essay about the history of cemeteries in New Orleans. The essay is framed and mounted on the wall alongside the photographs and framed introductory comments by Romanian-American writer Andrei Codrescu.
More thematically complex than either of those shows--and far more post-modern in concept--is Winston-Salem artist Anne Kesler Shields’ photo-based installation titled Boundaries. Designed specifically for the Waterworks’ unusually configured Woodson and Osborn galleries--two alcoves bridged on one side by a single long, curved wall--it deals with politics, cultural differences and international conflict as much as it does with religion.
Like other such site-specific gallery installations Shields has created since the early 1990s, Boundaries employs a collage-based appropriation strategy and photocopying technology, juxtaposing color reproductions of art-historical imagery with black-and-white photos from contemporary magazines and newspapers, albeit on billboard scale. Each of its 28 individual images is helpfully identified and sourced in a single-page gallery handout.
As indicated by its title, the piece emphasizes walls and other kinds of barriers, literal as well as philosophical and metaphorical. It raises timely issues having to do with protection, involuntary confinement and cultural prejudice.
Juxtaposed on one gallery wall, for example, are images of the imposing metal wall recently erected along Texas’ border with Mexico, barred cells at Baghdad’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the gridded, multi-story wall that remained temporarily standing in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center. Played off of each other on adjoining walls in the same gallery are images of Palestinians crossing over a collapsed wall built to separate Gaza from Egypt; a mazelike steel sculpture by Richard Serra; a lone pedestrian walking near a wall separating the Palestinian-controlled Abu Dis from East Jerusalem; and a shot of a man plunging headlong from the upper reaches of the World Trade Center’s north tower in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.
Other components of this provocative installation include views of the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China; details from historical paintings of Christian martyrs and Middle Eastern royalty; and images of flowers, a fashion model and a defeated looking U.S. soldier. In all cases these images are interspersed to maximize their thematic resonance and collective power.
The relatively small sizes of the adjoining galleries that house Boundaries render its large-scale imagery somewhat overwhelming and generate a claustrophobic ambience, but this effect works to its advantage. As a result, it comes off as one of Shields’ most effective photocopy installation to date.
Sean Meyers’ “The Faith Experience,” Sandra Russell Clark’s “Elysium” and Anne Kesler Shields’ "Boundaries" are on view through April 19 at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center, 123 East Liberty Street in downtown Salisbury. For more information phone (704) 636-1862. |