Wangechi Mutu. Eat Drink Swan Man, 2008; watercolor and collage on paper; overall dimensions, 43 x 63 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Wangechi Mutu will never experience the heated backlash that Kara Walker experienced. No one will call Mutu the “patsy of the white art establishment,” accuse her of selling fellow black artists down the river, or launch a letter-writing campaign to keep her artwork from being shown. There are good reasons for this: unlike Walker, the Kenyan-born Mutu does not share the slavery lineage of African-American artists and she does not make work with a lucid historical context. Yet Mutu’s work is often as disturbing as Walker’s, reconfiguring sexualized representations of women and creating visceral collages that appear more pornographic than critical.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: Is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, she has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion, and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker. Philadelphia, n.d. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, is on view until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, Little Touched at Susanne Vielmetter Projects runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut-wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, and red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery; still, Hagar is determined to make herself beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into a garish, overly made-up caricature, then collapses in exhaustion. At the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Wangechi Mutu. You pretty, no you pretty, 2008; watercolor and collage on paper; overall dimensions, 14 x 23 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

A similar self-destruction occurs in Little Touched. Mutu’s You pretty, no you pretty (2008) consists of two drawings in which opulent watercolor stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, You pretty, no you pretty disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Wangechi Mutu. A’gave you, 2008; mixed media collage on mylar; 93 x 54 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Mutu’s A’gave you (2008) pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, it uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Betye Saar declared war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Saar had reason to fear; Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem in which each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Kara Walker. Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, n.d.; cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s Excavated innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-kidnapping, genital grabbing, defecating, and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about nineteenth-century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind—silhouetted hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation, and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Kara Walker. Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, n.d.; cut paper on wall; 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres—Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net effect: They seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.

Entang Wiharso. Never Give Up, 2015; Aluminium sheet, laser cut, graphite, Saunders paper 638g; 165.5 × 116 × 3 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Never Give Up (2015) is an exemplary study of Entang Wiharso’s oeuvre: an allegorical undertaking that depicts the narrative of the postmodern human condition caught in the crossroads of political, ethnic, and religious systems. In fact, Never Say No, Wiharso’s latest show at Singapore Tyler Print Institute, reads like an expanded, digressive effort to interrogate notions of inconsistent social realities in a geopolitically transformed Southeast Asia, a region still strongly tied to tradition as it continues to navigate the benefits and pitfalls of the global economy.

Entang Wiharso. Borderless #1, 2015; lithography on Saunders 638g paper; 108 × 145 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

With their strange proportions, Wiharso’s images reference the dramatic characters of wayang kulit, an ancient Javanese storytelling tradition that uses shadow puppetry and draws from both Hindu myths in India and prehistoric animistic rites in Southeast Asia. The works in this show were created with a paper-casting process that introduces color and texture made by threads of soft yarn. The result is a dreamlike flatness, a visual mimicry of the two-dimensional forms of the wayang kulit, as a drama is played out that casts the viewer as a distant witness to a time when gods and humans coexisted and depended on one another.

Entang Wiharso. Shelter: Forest of Eyes, 2015; aluminum sheet, laser cut, C-type print; 127 × 184 × 3 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Characters in Shelter: Forest of Eyes (2015) metamorphose into beings made of vines and branches (they look more like woodland hybrids than human beings) in a labyrinthine tangle of tongues, tendons, and intestines—a visual and corporeal allusion to the medieval concept of the world as a perilous maze where the sacred and the profane intersect. In contrast, Home Sweet Home (2015) is quite entertaining, a vision of what wayang kulit characters might look like in a familial portrait when the chaos in the archetypical battles of good versus evil momentarily halts for a photographer’s hurried snapshot. There is also no lack of satirical playfulness operating in works such as Her Shifting Identity #1 (2015), in which a figure made from a psychedelic mix of colored splotches curls up in a manner that is reminiscent of a somersaulting fetus in a womb.

Entang Wiharso. Her Shifting Identity #1, 2015; colored paper pulp, yarn, acrylic paint, stencil; 132.5 × 168 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

But unlike the ancient myths of Southeast Asia that wayang kulit recounts, Wiharso’s narratives are wholly steeped in the contemporary notions of cultural appropriation and borderless living. Almost boring in comparison to the wildly rambunctious visual vocabulary of Wiharso’s varied oeuvre, Under Protection for 24 Hours (2015) is a depiction of two women in traditional clothes standing at barred windows against the backdrop of an old European town. One holds a gun, but both are on guard against the influences of foreign ilk, with long, braided hair that ends in crab claws. In a region deeply marked by postcolonial histories and the processes of rapid globalization, the art that is produced often parallels social concerns as evinced by the consistent evocation of identity with the use of the body as a site of contested territory. It is unsurprising that Wiharso, like many other artists of Southeast Asian origin, revisits these conflicting notions of power and tolerance for this exhibition, whose title is a gauntlet clearly thrown to challenge reigning paradigms. There is an unsettling sense of violence—of raw brutality—that seems inherent to many of the images, as body parts stretch out of proportion and sharp daggers hang over the heads of hybrid figures.

Entang Wiharso. Art as Gift: Comic Book Series, 2015; cast paper, acrylic paint, yarn, metal leaf, STPI handmade paper; 145 × 225 × 4 cm. Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

In Art as Gift (2015), intertwined bodies tussle viciously for dominance in a display of penetrative acts that are both erotic and menacing. It is the human condition made flesh, or rather, paper that is made to resemble puckered flesh, with images fashioned as though by razor-sharp claws and teeth, created by the need to survive in a present moment that is entangled by conflict. But Art as Gift is simply another take on Wiharso’s ambivalent stance, one that pits contemporary life against archaic folkloric tradition. This theme is so prevalent that it’s impossible to ignore the sense of paralysis that dominates his images—a dire consequence of being trapped in a field of contesting moral compulsions and conflicting expectations.

Entang Wiharso: Never Say No is on view at Singapore Tyler Print Institute through May 30, 2015.

Ronald Ventura, Point of Know Return 3, 2012, Edition of 3. 65 x 25.5 cm. Lithography and oil base paint on aluminium sheet. Photo: Courtesy of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Ronald Ventura’s latest suite of works, produced at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, examines how humanity relates to the environment, and how we often leave in our wake, a trail of destruction. Recyclables is Ventura’s show of lithographs, cast paper sculptures and paper relief on canvas produced from the discarded waste of urbanity, which he has recycled into a visual mélange of apocalyptic tales drawn from historical events and images found in popular culture.

Ronald Ventura, Zoomanities, 2008. Fiberglass Resin, Acrylic Polyurethane Paint Dimensions Variable (Approximately 10.5 - 16 IN.) Photo: Tyler Rollins Fine Art.

Having begun exploring the elemental correlation between man and nature in the Zoomanities mutant sculpture series in Metaphysics of Skin (2009) at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Recyclables furthers Ventura’s pessimistic investigations into environmental sustainability, then predicts our failure in doing so. Like hypothetical road signs identifiable to road users as hazard warnings, flamboyant triangular orange road signs in Ventura’s Point of Know Return series (2012) seem to display prophetic inclinations towards impending doom. Taking on the guise of the black-and-yellow Australian road signs, these aluminium plates, embellished with cartoon characters, skeletons, birds of prey and gas masks in lithography, consider the irreversible consequences of a fragile ecosystem thrown off balance and the prospect of a contaminated earth rendered unlivable by its own inhabitants. An installation of gigantic papier-mâché sculptures resembling fairytale toadstools, Broccoli Cloud (2012) offers, in this context, a more sinister interpretation of a potential nuclear fallout.

Ronald Ventura, Into The Woods 1, 2012. 199 x 290 x 21 cm. Frottage, ink, acrylic, cast paper, shaped handmade paper, and kozo paper on linen canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Consequently, the show’s grim imagery tends – inevitably – to coalesce around combustibles and exploding mushroom clouds, mitigated only by the presence of two series of works that seem to reference the arboreal archetypes in proto-religious beliefs. Into the Woods (2012) is a series of paper casts and imprintings of traditional Filipino wood panels and furniture, now reworked into a collage of paper trees. A curious mix of abstract and animistic objects are either imprinted on their paper trunks, or wedged between their branches and roots, evocative of the cosmic symbolism and the primitive conception of sacred trees on which founding myths are established. Like Into the Woods, Shadow Forest (2012) exhibits a similar idea with elegiac intensity, where small cast paper tree sculptures are first mounted on linen canvas then back-lit, resembling portions of primordial landscape and sacred elemental configurations.

Ronald Ventura, Shadow Forest series, 2012. Various sizes. Cast paper and acrylic on linen canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Like a threshold into a deeply spiritual or psychological realm, Ventura’s Edenic trees appear to offer a brief respite from the repeated rhetoric of mass destruction, and to walk in his enchanted forest is to walk into a strange world so far removed from its primeval beginnings. Seen in the light of Recyclables’ other installations, these works are also reminders of corrupted nature, where resource management is defined by and measured in weights, transactions and treaties.

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Born in 1973 in Manila, Ronald Ventura earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the royal and pontifical University of Santo Tomas in 1993, and now lives and works in Manila. Ronald Ventura: Recyclables will be on show at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute until 15 December 2012.

Ronchini Gallery exterior. Photo Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

At the entrance to the gallery, Hashimoto’s large-scale installation flows into motion with a subtle, meditative rhythm as I open the glass door and pass underneath. It conveys a sense of wonder and playfulness as the texture, lighting and angle of the work shifts and changes while traveling through the speckled environment. While meandering beneath, the bright, fluttering work reveals itself to be an illuminated, celestial landscape borrowed from traditional Japanese painting or Manga animation – each viewer becoming a figure suspended in a handcrafted paper paradise. The temptation to reach out and touch is too much for most, and many forfeit at least to blow a small breath of wind out, causing a delightful tremble to ribbon through the work.

Jacob Hashimoto installation at Ronchini gallery in London. Photo Courtesy of Michele Roberto Sereni and Ronchini Gallery.

The artist’s smaller works, hanging like wall paintings near the back of the space, are more like high-relief installations with tea saucer sized kites strung to each other, interwoven tightly and tied to wooden rods driven into the walls. Each kite stands at attention from the taught, pulled strings and vibrates and dances with any change in the wind (or the fanciful breath of the playful admirers.) Many seem like cartoonish landscapes, each kite a bulb of a swirling cloud or wave traveling along the surface of a sapphire blue ocean. Among the organic and ovular shapes, another more subtle work stands out in its geometric, dynamic lines like an ice colored, slender vertical waterfall of translucent paper bow-ties, sprinkled with a smattering of colored confetti.

On The Nature of Heroes, 2012 122 x 122 x 20 cm bamboo, paper, dacron, acrylic. Photo courtesy of Ronchini Gallery.

Incorporating craft, design, sculpture, installation and painterly abstraction, Hashimoto’s collective fluttering installations are buoyant, ethereal and celebratory – somehow traditional and modern at the same time. It is refreshing to say the least to attend an exhibition whose primary concern is with experiencing beauty. Hashimoto’s installation seemingly pours out into the street through the gallery’s windows to delight passerby’s and brighten the grey summer days of London.

JACOB HASHIMOTO: THE OTHER SUN

Jacob Hashimoto, in collaboration with Studio La Città, 29 June – 28 August 2012.

Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering Street – Mayfair, LONDON W1S 1AN +44 (0)20 7629 9188 info@ronchinigallery.com

www.ronchinigallery.com

Dans La Lune 2007 photo by Nash Baker

Kirsten Hassenfeld‘s ambitious paper sculptures far exceed what most would imagine could be created with the material at hand. A legion of delicate intricacies store like gems in the chest of treasure that is each piece she produces. The results of presumably painstaking hours spent folding, snipping, coiling and chaining, Hassenfeld’s sculptures are as elaborate as they are elegant. Recently, two of her bodies of work–Blueware and Dans la Lune–were on view at Brown University‘s David Winton Bell Gallery. The new series, Blueware, focuses on embodiments of nature, and both the Eastern and Western traditions of decorative arts. Meanwhile, Dans la Lune, which was a highly celebrated installation first exhibited at the Rice Art Gallery in Houston, Texas in 2007, thrills the senses with its ornate ceiling hung sculptures. The work glows with light from within and bathes in its own projection of baroque shadows.

Dans La Lune (detail) 2007 photo by Nash Baker

Kirsten Hassenfeld lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, Tuscon and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has been exhibited extensively, including at: Bellwether, New York, NY; The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Phillips de Pury, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY and White Columns, New York, NY. She is a 2006 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Currently exhibiting at the N2 Gallery in Barcelona, Spain are the works of Spanish artist Aurelia Munoz. The works on display are delicate, yet formidable, sculptures made of materials ranging from handmade paper to textile fibers. The piece Entre Social, 1976, is a large-scale macrame sculpture that serves as testimony to Munoz’s ability to beautifully marry geometry and abstraction with natural textiles, creating an entirely new three-dimensional artistic vocabulary. Mandala con flores, 1988, gives new meaning to the term “work on paper”. Made from tiny pieces of handmade paper, suspended on tiny strips of flax linen, Munoz successfully straddles the two and three-dimensional planes, capturing the ever-elusive medium of shadow. This exhibition, which will be on view through November, marks the first gallery exhibition for the 83 year-old in nearly thirty years, as her work primarily is shown in museums.

Aurelia Munoz was born in 1926 in Barcelona, Spain. Her works are included in many museum collections worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Stedelijk van Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland; Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain and theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain just to name a few.

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

Article by Catherine Wagley for DailyServing – Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“Eat Drink Swan Man”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 43″ x 63″ (nine parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, Mutu has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her, at least fleetingly, an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker, Philadelphia, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a Macarthur genius grant in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love,” is on exhibit until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, “Little Touched” at Susan Vielmetter Projects in LA, runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery. Still, Hagar is determined to make her self beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into ca garish, overly made-up caricature. Then she collapses in exhaustion. By the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“You pretty, no you pretty”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 14 ¬º ” x 23 ¬Ω” (two parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

A similar self-destroying occurs in “Little Touched.” Mutu’s “You pretty, no you pretty” consists of two drawings in which opulent water color stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, “You pretty, no you pretty” disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“A’gave you”, 2008 Mixed media collage on mylar 93″ x 54″ Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu’s “A’gave you” pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, “A’gave you” uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Bette Sayre waged war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Sayre had reason to fear: Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem; each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s “Excavated” innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-knapping, genital grabbing, defecating and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about 19th Century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict lyrical scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind — silhouette hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres — Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net affect: they seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.

The characters found in artist John Casey‘s drawings are often deformed and humorously dark. Each piece is created with dense line work and minimal color on a white ground and is said to reference a different psychological state experienced by the artist. While these “psychological” self portraits have an apparent dark side, they also embody a sense of fragility and vulnerability. This seems to be a consistent characteristic of the artist’s work. Casey is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art (1988). This year, the artist will be exhibiting “Metamorphorsis Chamber” with FPAC Gallery in Boston, Mass., and “New Works” with TAG Art Gallery in Nashville, Tenn. Last year, the artist exhibited with Boontling Gallery and 33 Grand, both in Oakland, California Next month, Casey will be featured in a group exhibition that highlights drawing at OKOK Gallery in Seattle.