How to Be Both

It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that… —Ali Smith, How to Be Both

How to Be Both brings together six artists working across print, painting, and installation to engage with the presence of the past and the potential of hybridity. Taking its title from Ali Smith’s celebrated novel of the same name, this show presents work by artists who contend with questions of how to be and how to create with an awareness of who and what has come before. Diverse lineages—from art historical iconography and familial inheritance to narratives of slavery, colonialism, craft, diaspora, queer and feminist theory—reverberate in works that deftly transcend tradition and expectations. The artists in this exhibition draw on collective, personal, political, and artistic histories as they investigate the boundaries of representation, materials, process, and identity while gesturing toward future possibilities. 

History is present here in many forms. Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s quilted textile print series, Not Nevermore, is a “gut reaction and visual response to the problematic 19th-century French wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord (The Views of North America).” Layering archival imagery and maps with her own contemporary line drawings, Lee-Johnson intervenes in the silences, exclusions, and erasures of incomplete and whitewashed historic records. Lu Heintz offers a sculptural interrogation of material and feminist histories of craft rendered in folded canvas, polished steel, rough ceramic, and sanded wood. In Heintz’s sculptures, the body and its labor are absent yet evoked through sensual and sharp silhouettes shaped from industrial materials smoothed and softened by the artist’s hand. Saturated and psychedelic striae of pigment radiate across canvas surfaces in Nick Carter’s vibrant paintings. Meticulously stitched lines of thread intersect canvas, suggesting an approach to making rooted as much in craft as in what a painting is or can be. An artist also deeply steeped in painting’s history and traditions, Bhen Alan creates woven tapestries that both recall centuries-old traditional Filipino textiles and abstract paintings. Composed of natural and synthetic fibers and shot through with pink, purple, teal and yellow lines interspersed with branches of bamboo and sugarcane, these works evidence Alan’s unique merging of cultural heritage and contemporary vision. Almost animate, the woven works appear poised to spring from the galleries at any moment. Heritage and diaspora are also driving forces in the work of Edwige Charlot, whose prints and sculptures reference the artist’s singular visual language rooted in Haitian Creole and Roman Catholic devotional traditions, as well as nature. Charlot’s work reveals the instability and inscrutability of images as layers of densely entangled plants refuse easy legibility and conjure portals to elsewhere. Heather Leigh McPherson’s paintings and drawings similarly draw on sacred themes and personal resonance; an image of madonna and child mirrored and repeated, a haloed and enrobed female figure, spectral everyday saints carefully drawn upon painted paper and encased in epoxy. In Hinterlands, drawings of outstretched hands and large, pearl-like droplets reminiscent of tears emerge as poignant symbols of loss, longing, and desire.

Although history and its traces are always relevant, the efforts by the current administration to erase narratives of Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ histories from our collective memory while defunding the arts and the institutions that preserve them makes these artists’ work more urgent and timely than ever. Drawing on a diverse array of influences and traditions, the artists in this show are united by a shared exploration of material properties and limits, a blending of forms and approaches, a keen sense of the past, a disruption of dominant narratives, and an embrace of expansive, imaginative practices that reach toward the future. Through individual and material meditations on memory, time, process, and practice, their layered works resist easy categorization, invite contemplation, and reveal unexpected resonances. — Persephone Allen, Curator