Courtesy of the artist and projects + gallery
Dario Calmese, "No. 49."
Artist Dario Calmese, based in New York and raised in North City, wasn’t necessarily looking for a model and muse when he crossed paths with socialite Lana Turner.
Really, he was just looking for hats for a project for graduate school. And Turner’s collection was on view every Sunday morning at their shared house of worship, Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem—but it went far beyond hats.
“She is a sartorial moment every Sunday,” Calmese says of Turner.
The force of her style and her commitment to beauty led Calmese to an entirely new project, centered around her and her clothes. Rather than his original plan of using her hats on a model, Calmese thought that Turner herself, who brought her own narrative to the images, would be a better choice.
The show, “amongst friends.” is a series of intimate black and white portraits of Turner in her fantastic collection of clothes, hats and accessories, styled and photographed by Calmese. It opens Friday at projects+gallery in the Central West End.
It’s his first show in St. Louis, and his first solo show in the U.S.—he previously had a solo exhibition in Turkmenistan.
“It’s nice to come back home,” he says. His photos with Turner speak to his St. Louis youth.
“A lot of the work just comes from my memories of St. Louis, growing up in the church,” he says. “My father is a pastor. Seeing my mother get dressed, that Sunday ritual.”
Calmese says he saw Turner’s commitment to an empowered beauty every Sunday morning as revealing a greater truth about the church for African Americans.
Courtesy of the artist and projects + gallery
Dario Calmese, "No. 64."
“What I saw through Miss Turner was how the black church itself has served as a kind of technology of sorts for black America,” he says. “I mean a device through which a person can do something else. It allows for an elevation and a construction of the self.”
Calmese says he’s looking forward to showing his work in St. Louis’s Central West End at this post-Ferguson moment in his native city’s history. The protest movements of 2014 and the international attention they garnered shined a spotlight on the city’s racial segregation and strife. He looks forward to his grandmother rubbing elbows with gallery habitués, and hopes to break down a few barriers in the process.
“It’s important for black and brown people to see themselves elevated, and to see their stories told at a high level,” he says. “For black and brown people to see their church experience, to have it in that space—my hope is that the exhibition serves as an intervention of sorts.”
Miss Turner, as Calmese reverently refers to her, is formal and elegant. She grew up in a Pentecostal church and has always taken Sunday dressing seriously.
The 68-year-old Turner, he says, had a very distinct pivot in her life where she decided that if something wasn’t beautiful, it had no place in her environs. He has come to call her a friend, a mentor, and a font of wisdom and knowledge.
“A visit to Miss Turner’s will change your life.”
“amongst friends.” opens Friday, February 16 at projects+gallery from 5-8 p.m. Saturday the 17 at 1 p.m., Calmese will give an artist talk, joined by his subject, Lana Turner. The exhibition runs through March 31.
