Four exciting new shows opened at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on Friday, January 27, bringing brilliant new colors and vivid, daring figures into its spacious, open Midtown galleries.
Deana Lawson, one of two African-American artists who opened at CAM on Friday, has a self-titled show of striking color photographs. She included two still lifes – a white car, a red beach towel with flies – but mostly she devotes her camera’s gaze to black faces and bodies.
She tends to pose her subjects carefully, with them looking at the camera, so their intensity of gaze is a primary experience looking at these photographs. She also favors formal compositions with the human subject staged as part of a larger tableaux.
One photograph has two young black women comfortably holding one another, the silhouette of their bodies forming the shape of a heart, with a giant Mickey Mouse painted behind them. A description of the painting makes it sound contrived, but it’s beautiful and powerful.
The nudity of the young women, and the gorgeous tones and textures of their skin – one darker-skinned, the other brighter-skinned – contribute to its beauty and power.
“That’s just my love for the black body,” Lawson said, during a museum tour for media and patrons on Friday morning.
Lawson said she chose her subjects, in part, for their varying skin tones, as one mixes specific colors when painting. As she said, it’s “skin as palette.”
In another photograph, she lucked into recruiting a subject whose skin had been inked with a tattoo that added a new dimension to the image she had in mind of this young black man sprawled on top of a white car.
“I have this thing for men and cars,” she said with a laugh.
It was a car much seen around the Alabama town where she often visited a friend. She said she recruited the subject, Cortez, from the group of guys congregated around the car to capture his physical beauty. She asked him to take his shirt off so she could focus on his body and skin.
“In God We Trust,” she found tattooed across his chest.
Cortez is posed alone (with the God on his chest), but mostly Lawson groups together black people who love one another and hold one another with everyday comfort, affection and support.
“It’s affirming connectedness and people holding onto each other,” she said. “That’s important.”
Louis Cameron’s photographs could not be further from the black body or interpersonal connectedness. His show is called “Clouds,” and that about sums it up. It’s a group of cell phone photographs of the sky that Cameron layered and digitally manipulated. Anyone with an Instagram account might say they could do that and, indeed, plenty have plowed a cell phone photo of clouds through a filter app, but these images are highly wrought and intense.
Lisa Melandri, CAM’s executive director who led the tour, said the photographs are “extraordinarily poetic,” possessing “a true beauty.”
Cameron said he likes to look skyward, looking for “abstraction in the sky.” The images he arrived at have suggestions of figures – a rib cage, a tornado, an aerial view of a landscape – but then, as with looking at clouds themselves, each viewer will see their own things in these collisions of shapes and colors.
Cameron also brought his Poster Project to CAM. He has two series of posters, one about being a black man dealing with police, the other about immigration. These are mostly commissioned pieces made by other artists. All are available, copyright-free, for public download at http://www.posterprojectpresents.net/.
The largest space in CAM is devoted to a self-titled show of drawings and paintings by Nicola Tyson, a British artist who lives and works in upstate New York. Tyson has called her work “psychofiguration.” Melandri said they look “like the body turned inside-out,” and described one figure as being in “stylistic pain.” Many of the figures Tyson paints and draws are grotesques or mutants, but her work is wonderfully energetic, enigmatic and somehow not ugly, despite all the deformation. The work is neither disturbed nor disturbing, but rather a confident, instinctive working-through of serious and dramatic problems.
CAM’s big, long wall is given over to a site-specific spray-painting by Katherine Bernhardt. It’s pretty cool. It would be possible to say something brainier about these big, bright animals, plants and objects – an emoji, a toucan, a watermelon, a leaf, a cigarette, a frond, a roll of toilet paper, a battery – all painted in the wrong colors (the cigarette is blue). But it’s pretty cool. Go check it out.
These shows hang through April 16 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Ave. in Midtown St. Louis. Visit http://camstl.org/.
