Photo Credit: Amy Schmutte
“Places I’ve been and may never see again,/ I won’t say haunted but I get visited/ and it follows me around wherever I go./ Begin to begin, begin to begin.”
“Begin to Begin”—Field Report
If we’re not haunted by the last dreaded year, it surely still follows us around, at the very least with masks, whether pocketed or making us strangers to friends. Worst of all is a plague of recollected fright, sickness and loss.
So slowly, we begin to begin, again, the new “old” life.
One of Milwaukee’s lesser-known art galleries reflects back on the pandemic with vivid and resonant forms and imagery. The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St., is best known as a live music venue, which obscures its distinguished history of well-curated and extremely diverse art exhibits, by the venue’s manager Mark Lawson, who also curates galleries at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
“ReBegin: New Works for New Beginnings,” a group show of 18 artists running through May 29, suggests creative rebirth from pandemic, but also how we may never see the places we’ve been to, in the same way. Howard Leu's noirish, black-and-white photo-archival print, You Don't Call No More, conveys social loss, with art loft-like windowpanes separating the viewer from fog-enshrouded telephone poles. Roxane Mayer’s gritty, cold-wax encaustic-entombed facades include the year’s other massive human pilgrimage to healing, defiant social activism, with a window-pane poster reading “Hate Has No Home Here.”
Jim Farrell’s two pieces, rich with evocative, story-telling textures, address the mind and psyche—Ancestral Orbit in profound quests and Logic Perimeter in a human head’s mathematical cogitations, a fight-or-flight reflex toward cleansing the virus’s impact, a longed-for rebeginning. Similarly, Karen Williams-Brusubradis’ large acrylic painting, Metamorphosis, reveals the microscopic workings of an apparent human nervous system in transformation from forces playing, or preying, upon it.
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Among the most optimistic or affirmative pieces is Benny Higgins’ lyrical Frog Hunter III, depicting an at-risk boy playing at a riverside, somewhat autobiographical in that Higgins, a former police officer and untrained artist, now counsels “men to be better men” at a women's shelter, Lawson explains.
Amy Schmutte’s virtuosic and innovative color photography seems to depict spring’s inevitable emergence from an atmosphere-immersed haze. In her Lewis Carroll-esque titled Sproutoutlyng, a lusciously sinuous flower fights through a sublime shadow of infected memory. Schmutte, who co-curated the show, prints her photos on brushed metal plates “because the way that light plays with that surface adds another layer of beauty” in photography, which she thinks of as “writing with light.”
Well said.
Yet for me, the most eloquent and powerful piece in the show is its only sculpture, Chrysalis, by Jessica Schubkegel. This is a life-sized figure of a woman, prone and apparently afflicted. The piece comprises a model constructed of wire mesh, covered by a skin montage of torn fragments from a medical text. Buoyed in grace with elegant gestures, the form follows one leg raised at the knee, sinuous hip contraposto, and an arm bent to reach gently for the throat. It balances a sense of repose and illness that dwells deep in uncertainty. For all that hard-earned beauty, the closer you look, the more you discover implications of insight in the medical bits of meaning, an immersive, acute sense of possible doom. Still, the title perseveres. This mummy-like presence mirrors nature’s rebirth, and a sense of emergence and deliverance.
