Fashion & Identity

What we wear is a manifestation of our cultural identity and cultural practices. Our bodies become canvases that communicate to the rest of the world our occupations, our predilections, our socioeconomic status, and, I suppose in some cases, our level of hygiene.

What we chose to wear to certain events also adheres to a cultural code of dress: at weddings brides from a certain background will wear a white dress, in times of mourning we wear black, at graduation we're forced to wear large black robes and funny hats. These dress codes are so deeply ingrained we hesitate to give them a second thought. We embrace them without question. So it's only when you see the same manner of visual expression manifested in a very different way in a different culture that you realize the most basic idea - we're all the same (hint: I dig Claude Levi-Strauss)

At least that was what I was thinking when I went to see the opening of the new exhibition at the Fleming Museum this past Wednesday. "Colors of the Amazon: Featherworks from the Nalin and Petersen Collections," a collection of body ornaments, headdresses, costumes, baskets, musical instruments and other ceremonial objects from Amerindian tribes of the Amazon basin collected over the past thirty years by Dr. David Nalin and late UVM Professor James Petersen, an anthropologist.


In societies without a written language, these pieces figure prominently in conveying important historical facts, myths and legends, and societal codes. The tribes represented here, the Waiwai, Karajá, Tembé, Ka'apor, Rikbaktsú, Yanomamo, Wayana-Apalai and Tapirapé, used the bright feathers of Amazonian birds such as parrots, toucans and macaws as the raw materials for bodily ornamentation. These objects are symbolic of celebration and social cohesion. It is interesting to note that the birds used are domesticated, not killed, for further use and cultivation of their feathers.

The viewer will be impressed not only by the gorgeous colors - bright and stunning, but the level of workmanship and execution that went into creating these pieces. I know we all watch "Project Runway" and wonder, "how did they create that from nothing?", but the work here is to be truly admired. One particular piece caught my eye, a "Fire Ant Ritual Mitt," an intricately and acutely geometric example of basketry modeled after the shape of a sting ray. The mitt is used in initiation ceremonies among the Wayana-Apalai. A young boy's courage is demonstrated when he sticks his hand into a mitt full of fire ants. Combs, ear decorations and the magnificent headdresses will impress viewers. The exhibit is well curated in that it also gives the viewer the cultural story and importance behind each object.

The show also subtlety hints at the intrusion of the modern world into these tribes' existence. We learn that, with the introduction of trade to the region, tribe members used beads and twine from such distance places as Italy and the Czech Republic in their work. The tourist trade demanded featherworks as well for wealthy foreigners and colonialists to use as decoration. For Brazil, as UVM History Professor Ernesto Capillo says, the featherworks became "symbols of national identity complementing the process of modernization." Does that mean that through mass production these works lost meaning? Perhaps not to the people whose cultural history and identity is entwined in them, but this is a question the viewer leaves the exhibition with.

The show runs until November 19, 2006.

Ecovention in Art

Like his predecessors in the Dada and Found Object Art movements, Robert Rauschenberg believed that art could come from the combination of seemingly incongruous and unheard of materials – of anything. For him, this idea manifested itself in his revolutionary Combines paintings and the use of organic materials in his Nature Paintings and Dirt Painting. Rauschenberg channeled this technique into environmental art, still a burgeoning field in its infancy in the 1950s.

Today, Rauschenberg’s Earthday 1970 poster, created for the first Earth Day celebration, can be looked upon as the catalyzing moment in the field of environmental art, inspiring such contemporary artists as Jackie Brookner and Alan Sonfist, whose work, along with Rauschenberg’s famous poster is on display at the Firehouse Gallery as part of the HUMAN=NATURE show.


Rauschenberg said, “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” For Brookner, whose interests focus on water protection, this aesthetic is taken to the next level: her art is the creation of living ecosystems in situ, blending “ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphoric and aesthetic capacities of sculpture,” as curator Victoria Anstead writes. Her work’s purpose is to draw community interest in public art projects that, while they please the eye, also serve the greater purpose of environmental remediation and a call for policy change. Her contribution to this show is Utterances, in which a large moss-covered tongue lords over a self-sufficient ecosystem. The suggestion here is that communication between systems creates mutually beneficial cooperation and coexistence.

Like Brookner, Sonfist takes a similar in situ approach. The artist, whose career spans forty years, is perhaps best known for his Time Landscapes, which visually chronicle the changes throughout the restoration of a natural environment within a man-made environment. In this show, the time landscape is a triptych covering the development of a garden/park nestled on the corner of Houston Street and LaGuardia Place in New York City. What’s most shocking to the viewer here is the stark contrast between the grey cityscape and the tiny vibrant piece of green growing in a seemingly dead space. It calls to mind Eliot’s waste land, or the eyes of T.J. Eckleberg looking out upon that waste land in The Great Gatsby. The pessimistic undertones of those references aside, Sonfist’s work communicates something on a more positive note: that engaging forgotten spaces can revive them.




One only has to step into City Hall Park, right next to the Firehouse Gallery, to realize such potentiality – the park has been revitalized from its former destitute status; the old Firehouse itself was also re-discovered by the City and renovated to its former grandeur, this time as a home for arts. As Rauschenberg said, "You begin with the possibilities of the material."

Flashes of Light & Life

In his photography, Michael Flomen takes the beauty of nature and abstracts it into large scale black and white works that are somewhat discombobulating to the viewer. What are we looking at? Where are we? The fluctuation between abstract and representational creates stunningly complex images. Using elements of nature, the movement of the wind and the moon for example, he invites the viewer to take a very different look at the natural environment.

As part of the HUMAN=NATURE show at the Firehouse Gallery, a set of five exhibits exploring the relationship between humans and their natural environments, Flomen has contributed Higher Ground, a photographic study of the movement of fireflies. In creating a system in which the fireflies found themselves floating between photosensitive paper and a sheet of glass, Flomen was able to capture the patterns left by their bioluminescence. What is left on the photo paper is, as curator Victoria Anstead writes, “flight patterns…streaks of white, and the insects’ characteristic pulsating [becomes] exploding orbs of light.”


In these photographs one sees the patterns of life for a small family in the animal kingdom; mating patterns become “elaborate ballets,” patterns of flight become the trail of a dialogue, a moment of movement in nature is frozen forever in a gorgeous tableau. Perhaps what is most tangible here is the memory of human interaction with nature: a childhood memory of warm summer nights spent chasing after fireflies. The large image serves to heighten this experience of childhood wonderment – what are these incredible creatures glowing in the night sky? Incidentally, fireflies are a symbol for nostalgia in Japanese culture, a theme explored in the 2001 film Firefly Dreams. In Flomen's show they serve as a means of exploring this theme.


Flomen’s photographs suggest that we must pay attention to the smallest aspects of nature; that there is beauty in the shortest moments, the slightest movements and importance in the minuscule aspects of our natural environment. We all depend upon one another in this world. His work gives us a novel way to enjoy moments we perhaps have forgotten or did not fully appreciate. To enjoy and reflect upon our interactions with nature, rather than solely the connections to our human developed environments, is suggested with this series. Flomen's show runs through July 30 and is on the second floor of the Firehouse Gallery on Church Street Marketplace.

The Other Side of the Story

In keeping with yesterday's post, here are some newsbites about new films, fashion and books that tell the other side of the story:

"The Monster Talks" An new opera comes to New York telling Grendel's side of the story (forget Beowulf!).
"The Guys Have It" Tales and designs from the explosive world of menswear fashion.
"18 With a Bullet" A documentary tracks the lives of the members of a gang in San Salvador.
"Voices from the Other America" New literature marks a resurgence in works from writers in South America.

"A Call to Look": Sudanese Refugee Artwork

Visual art is the tool by which we are able to communicate ideas to a greater public. In an age of mass production and mass communications, the ability to send these images to all crevises and communities in the world (well as long as you have access to a computer, that is) is our modern way of participating in a time-old tradition: telling stories. Sharing stories that shed light on issues we may not have learned of otherwise and expose us to worlds very different from our. Every now and again they can open our minds to an experience outside of ours, motivate us to get involved, challenge us to make a change, however small. That is the motivation behind the exhibit at the Metropolitan Gallery, "Painting Faces on War: Brave Hearts of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan," an exhibit comprised of artwork and ethnographic materials.

As Sarah Kariko said in an interview with the Seven Days: "It's a call to look. These paintings give a visual voice to those who have no other representations of their families and villages." Because there is so little photographic documentation of where they came from -- a part of Africa that's routinely ignored by the Western media -- "there's a whole generation of kids in the refugee camps who have not even an indirect experience of traditional life," Kariko notes.



Kariko, a sculptor, worked with artist and Sudanese refugee Atem Thuc Aleu on putting the show together. Aleu started his artistic studies in 1994 at the age of 14 under the tutelage and encouragement of UN aid workers. He soon became the art instructor for nearly 75 rufugees, using art as a tool of therapy and communication. "The year I started painting in Kakuma, I was having dreams of Sudan and of my people every night. Every morning I tried to draw my dream. I would often see people running and being shot."(Seven Days)
In 2001 he was one of the fortunate few to resettle in the United States, in his case, in Utah, where he is currently a student at Brigham Young University. Kariko and Aleu came together when she became involved in the activities of the Sudanese community here in Vermont and Aleu came to teach a course in art to that community. The show was born out their friendship and the art of the refugees.

Of particular poignancy in this exhibit are the ethnographic elements. Next to each photo of a refugee is a placard containing a short biography: where the refugee is from, when they came to the US, what they are doing now, and what they hope to do in the future. Some hint at the violence the individual encountered; others are more graphic, such as that of a young woman who was beaten with the butts of guns. Some talk of small achievements such as garnering a driver's license; others discuss achievements as students at UVM. All of the bios end with each person's desire to return home to find lost family members. The spectator leaves with a note of sadness: how difficult it must be to reconcile oneself with the fortune of resettling in a stable environment while family is still aboard in a hellish environment.

This show may be called "A Call to Look" but it's subtext is a call to engagement, to engage in a crisis and rectify it, to engage in the lives of others who simply want a stable existence for their family and friends. The show runs through August 7.

July's Art: Phebe Mott

Last Friday night was a gorgeous Burlington evening! Sunny with a refreshing breeze in the air (much needed after the humidity and rain we have suffered through). Throughout our tour we saw some amazing art work, from the art of Sudanese refugees resettled in Vermont to encaustic paintings, works in which the artist uses waxes and oil paints to Vogue Magazine worthy jewelry to art for the purposes of ecovention....keep visiting this page to find out more about the art...and what I thought about it.



I won't leave you hanging though....I'll start off with the work I saw at the first gallery we visited: the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. "Summer Serendipity" by Phebe Mott opened there last night. Mott uses carefully rendered strokes of acrylic paint to potray intimate moments in everyday life. Here scenes of summer moments grace the walls and jump out of the viewer. The colors are vibrant and deep, the canvases large. As the viewer moves closer toward the painting, she can fully admire Mott's brushwork: up close one can see the subtle layering of colors, a large space of cobalt blue reveals lavendars, pinks, even oranges, peeking out from underneathe. Also apparent is the texturing on the canvases. In one seascape scene it appears as though Mott has placed sea salt or sand on parts of the canvas then painted over that. In another it seems as though the canvas has been cut or altered prior to painting. She uses these elements to communicate aspects of the environment in a tactile way. Sand crystallizes, waves move. I hope you can see those details in the photos I've taken...



Mott's work conveys the theme of intimate moments. She chooses not to potray the faces of her human subjects lending nicely to the theme of universality - these could be scenes fron anyone'e life. In fact a painting of three blonde women sitting on a wicker sofa on a porch immediately reminded me of my two younger sisters and me, chatting away on a summer evening. As the artist herself says, "I feel drawn to the flashes of life that might not get a lot of attention...There are moments that we don't think about and I like to think that I'm giving them some importance." The show runs through September 2. You can find out more about Mott at www.phebemott.com.

Artistic Formulas...

Here are some topic of interest in today's art news:

"Graffiti = Art?" Interesting article questioning moving graffiti from its environment to galleries....
"Digital Cool + Expressionistic Intensity" New show from Jane Callister in LA - think Jackson Pollock meets the digital age.....
"Surgeon's Skill x 29 Canvasses" Plastic surgery as the impetus for artistic endeavor?? Hard to believe but true...
"Hair + Nail Polish = Art?" A hair design contest draws participants from forty-nine different countries to Russia!

Photo Test

Just wanted to make sure I could post photos. This is from my visit to the Vatican in Roma, Italy last spring. I'm not a religious person, but that was an amazing experience! This is the hall of maps in one of the many corridors (for lack of a better word) that leads up to the Sistine Chapel. The maps are of the provinces of Italy and they are gorgeous, brightly-colored, detailed and a wonder! This shot is, of course, the ceiling so you can't see the maps, but perhaps it is meant to suggest that what is on earth is beautiful but what is above is even more glorious?? Like I said I'm not religious but I can paraphrase Hamlet when he instructs Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt up of in philosophy!

First Friday

This is my first post! Very exciting. This blog is going to be about the arts scene in Burlington, Vermont. There is a bunch of cool stuff going on here so I'll do my best to post photos and reviews up here to keep you in the loop and let you know what's happening. Like this Friday. As in tomorrow. The Burlington City Arts Center will be holding its First Friday Art Walk. Just drop by the Firehouse Gallery on Church Street in Burlington around 5ish and go on a tour with BCA volunteers to check out the art in the area. There a bunch of gallery spaces, art in salons (such as the Men's Room, which has had some gorgeous photography for the past two months), and jewelry shops, such as the Grannis Gallery (last month they had jewelry rendered out of meteorite rock found in Namibia juxtaposed with diamonds - heaven and earth as the artist touted it!). You should really check it out!