J. Tim Raymond

The recent opening at CEPA Gallery of three new exhibitions offers much to mull over concerning the present state of the human condition. These works will be on view to August 22nd.

Justine Kurland’s photographs

Flux Gallery and 2nd floor Passageway Gallery

In Justine Kurland’s au natural landscapes, folks are just going about the business of being human. In scenes of nudity and community her peaceable subjects sprall, squat, and stride across the rough edges of the continent.

With children hoisted they move and halt mid-step; a curious tribe of seasoned parishoners in the great church of the land remote. Kurland’s pilgrims are so much a part of the verdant surroundings they are no more startling than deer tripping down to a brook to drink.

But in a closer second look, especially in the ensemble portraits, the viewer may be struck by a sense of common identity; these are people we might have gone to school with or met briefly at a party, perhaps a teacher, sister in-law, an uncle, someone we knew in the war.

So many archetypes of our disaffiliated and imminently mobile culture, having taken the other road (and that one plenty less traveled), living in a sliver of space between fatalism and self-determination. Up beyond the logging trails and firebreaks they shed their clothes like skin. What is more naked than that?

Many Moons, photographs by Alice O’Malley

3rd floor passageway

Alice O’Malley brings her community of friends back to Buffalo in a series of black and white works striking for their close, focused intensity. In these portraits the subjects look straight into the camera, expressions neutral. Got up in feathers and make-up, they hold the viewer in a momentary spell of calculated come-hither.

Speaking with the artist last fall revealed numerous antecedents to her art: Eugene Atget, the French photographer of a morally emancipated 1920s Paris; August Sander, the pre-war German portraitist to the working class; Cecil Beaton, photographer to café society, and more recent influences such as Diane Arbus, Bruce Weber, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar.

It is Hujar that Ms. O’Malley cites as her immediate mentor. His black and white photographic work with the gay community during the AIDS epidemic of the late ’70s and ’80s stands as an historical focal point for realist portraiture. This little-known but innovative artist died in 1987. Alice O’Malley continues to explore the fragile existence of the human being as a thing among other things. She focuses on the flesh beyond the incidence of costume.

Brian Ulrich’s retail and dark stores

Underground Gallery

These large framed C-Prints pose consumers in situ. Under the bright glaze of store light fixtures they appear to pause, weighing cost options in a garish atmosphere of material gluttony. Ulrich travels as far as Scotland to document a consumer culture “malled” by rampant overabundance. Here are the liquidated assets of America in scenes of criminal rape of land, by conquest and concrete.

— J. Tim Raymond

CEPA exhibit showcases a partnership in teaching artist instruction

by J. Tim Raymond, featured in Artvoice

Currently on exhibit at CEPA Gallery is Writing With Light, work by students from three Buffalo public schools — Native American Magnet, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Highgate Heights. Writing with Light is a joint venture between CEPA Gallery and Just Buffalo Literary Center, in which students gain practical experience in the literary and photographic arts.

I met with Karen Lewis and Amy Luraschi, teaching artists representing Just Buffalo and CEPA Gallery respectively, for a tour of this spacious exhibition. Both were gracious and enthusiastic in their willingness to walk me through the process from the initial administrative partnership, to granting agencies groundwork, to initiating the children in the basics of photography and poetry. They offered their responses to the finished photos, and personal narratives worked up in 10-week project sessions, all shoehorned in between the public school years’ rigorous testing schedules and the often unchanneled energies fifth and sixth grade boys and girls.

Lewis, the writing teacher, spoke of getting kids to open up their verbal imaginations and of investing their words with personal meaning in response to the photos they had taken.

Luraschi, from CEPA, spoke of the mixed delight and anxiety the children demonstrated as they were each given a small disposable camera, for which they were responsible for a whole week. She instructed them in the basic concerns of framing the photographic image, emphasizing line, shape, texture, pattern, and perspective, as well as pointing out what to watch for so they did not waste film on “oops pictures,” though even those could produce “happy accidents.”

So now the student had the tools to build a stock of images using the basic elements of design to get more expressive pictures — and to push past the ordinary episodes of the visual field, such as the TV sets, video game screens, all the offhand vacant bits of the average snapshot, to produce something closer to an authentic expression of their own personal lives.

As we moved from room to room in the CEPA gallery, the chosen photos with their accompanying narratives of stories and poems filled the air with personal revelations, observations, momentary inspirations, all in the guileless prose of very young people. There were hints of street-educated timing and rhythm at work in these brief missives, evident of the near constant social backgrounds of rap and hip-hop music.

In speaking later with CEPA director Lawrence Brose, I was told that the photos are the visual measure of the literary investigation giving grant administrators an assessment tool in developing future projects.

Once into the depth and insight of the children’s words, their own voices are as real as if they were speaking them aloud in the gallery with us. And any clinical, sociopolitical parenthesis of one’s jaded presumptions dissolved.

Certainly many of these kids are “at risk” children from neighborhoods that account for much of the lack of a robust tax base in Buffalo. Children witness to lives gone sour, hope gone south, promise cut short — tragedies and loss-stricken stories that saturate the City and Region section of the daily news.

But as the teaching artists attest, these are images taken by the children on their own terms. Each child chose one from the developed shots to build a narrative, either factual or fictional, under the general headlines of “change and respect” — both conceptually challenging to deal with solely in a visual way. The writing component depicts family, friends, teachers, pets to marked effectiveness, exploring relationships, love, hate, and raw, unpolished emotional release.

That is not to say the exhibition is in the least unprofessional. These five- to 10-week projects integrate photo-poets’ collaborations anchored in the solid tradition of artists before them — Milton Rogovin most especially, but photojournalists like Susan Misellas, Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, Bernice Abbott, and of course Gordon Parks have a vital countenance in the margins of these images. In speaking with the dedicated teachers and staff of these cultural agencies, I was heartened by the strength of their commitment to each child, to creating a shared experience as each child, in a poem or recollection, began to build a vocabulary of discovery, and to engendering in them the values and uses of the verbal and visual arts of expression, widening their fields of experience and allowing them to encompass with confidence and engagement anything that may lie on their burgeoning horizon.

Excerpts from the writing of students from the Native American Magnet School:

“Waiting for the photos to be developed was like a bird waiting for its eggs to hatch.” — Robert Sanabria

“What I discovered about writing is — it’s important.” — Asia Purifoy

“Writing is a lot about what you think.” — Max Hernandez

“I felt privileged. I connected most strongly to my parents loving each other.” — Juan Martinez

Hallwalls, Buffalo’s internationally recognized and widely respected community resource for artists of all disciplines, is providing a spacious venue for Alfonso Volo’s manic menagerie, entitled Thrifting for Beauty. For context on this pixellated phantasmagoria, one might look to the obsessive/compulsive walking daydreamers in any secondhand store.

Volo, like many artists, sees simulacra to the human condition in the ceramic, Hummelesque figures offered for sale on rummage tables and flea markets for a quick fix of sentimental adrenalin. Older adults especially seem to find a measure of comfort in these homey curios, patting and straightening them, certainly dusting them in the course of mundane domestic chores.

Volo plucks such touchstones from their respective shelf lives and repurposes them to his own mercurial modus operandi. In the world of Volo, Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit and Crusader Rabbit morph into Matt Groening’s fez-wearing rabbit from Life in Hell, while Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck do a doppelganger to the tune of “Rabbit Season, Duck Season.” The issues that connect the points on Volo’s compass are not merely china knickknacks in cute hand-stitched get-ups, but link intimations of dark matters of the soul. While a single visit to this show may not provide clues enough to satisfy suspicions that Volo’s work is largely a self-indulgent mania for a certain kind of kitsch object (call it angst-mensch), his frequent additions of evidentiary assault point to the artist’s overlapping concerns for animal rights. while his computer animation’s wan calculus offers ominous conclusions about humanity’s inevitable collisions with nature.

When in 1970, the German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys cradled a dead hare and posed with it in the guise of instruction, he made a space for Volo’s preoccupation with the icons of hunting lust. When in 1971, Dennis Oppenheim posted a chained German shepherd dog at each corner of a rectilinear installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, he entitled it “Guarded Space.”

Jeff Koons’ massive “Flower Puppies” also pointed to the use of domestic creatures to put a fine point on the relationship between humans and animals; think of the They Might Be Giants song “Little Birdhouse in Your Soul.” Such lyrical visitations make a good fit for Volo’s ruminations on animal cartoon amanuensis. What curator John Massier called “the tidy moral lesson” of animal-based fables is in recess here. Minimalist vignettes play out on Volo’s mirrored stage sets, with little critter stand-ins for our systemized, desensitized society that allows us to keep actuarial body counts projecting the risk-assessment of continued existence for favored species.

Volo’s aesthetic is quixotic and disarming, and yet his array of miscellaneous tchotchkes project a coldly prescienct strategist, maneuvering his trinkets for maximum novelty of precision and sustained impact.

— J. Tim Raymond