How To Be Both

How to Be Both brings together six artists working across print, painting, and installation to explore the persistence of the past and the potential of hybridity. Taking its name from Ali Smith’s celebrated novel, which collages narratives across the 15th and 20th centuries to explore the continued relevance of the past to the present, this show presents work by artists who contend with the central question of how to be and how to create with an attentiveness to what and who has come before while expanding and opening up new ground. Collectively these artists explore how diverse lineages—from familial inheritance to art historical iconigraphy—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, 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)”, in which Lee-Johnson layers archival imagery and maps with her own contemporary line drawings to intervene in the silences and erasures of incomplete and whitewashed historic records.

Lu Heintz offers a sculptural interrogation of material and feminist histories of craft, labor, and the body rendered in folded canvas, polished steel, rough ceramic, and sanded wood.

Saturated and psychedelic striae of pigment radiate across canvas in Nick Carter’s new work that raises questions related to craft and conventions. Dyed canvas is intersected in these works by meticulously stitched lines of thread, challenging preconceived notions of 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. Rendered in natural and recycled 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 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 digital technologies of laser cutting, refusing easy legibility and conjuring portals to elsewhere.

Heather 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.

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, and a reaching 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.