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Courtesy of the artist
Addoley Dzegede, "Broken Buoy," 2016, found rope and plastic buoy, copper leaf, indigo
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Courtesy of the artist
Addoley Dzegede, "Torfbærinn I+II," 2016, glazed ceramics with model turf and grass
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Courtesy of the artist
Addoley Dzegede, "Local Color (Icelandic Kente)," 2016, handwoven kente made with yarn dyed using Icelandic plants, driftwood, ceramic “bone” bobbins and sticks
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Photograph by David Johnson
"Wig Heavier Than a Boot," at beverly.
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Photograph by David Johnson
"Cave 15," from Wig Heavier Than a Boot at beverly
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Photograph by David Johnson
"NC 40," from Wig Heavier Than a Boot at beverly
On Saturday, you have one last chance to see the shows currently on view at fort gondo compound for the arts and its sister gallery, beverly. These also happen to be the final-final-final shows for both galleries before they close forever. If you've been a frequent visitor to Cherokee over the last five, 10, or even 15 years, you know that's a big deal. We're not going to dive into that topic here—that'll be the subject of another post—but we'll say that both are powerful exhibits that do justice to the space gondo created for St. Louis artists over the past decade and a half.
On exhibit at gondo proper is "Fare Well," the first solo show for multidisciplinary artist Addoley Dzegede, a Florida native who earned her MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design + Visual Art in 2015. The title of the exhibit, she says, was a gesture of goodbye to gondo, but also touches on "doing well, and how sometimes, in order to do well, you have to say goodbye, and leave." Dzegede did her own temporary leaving last summer when she spent June and July in Skagaströnd, Iceland for the Nes Artist Residency. Because much of the work at gondo was produced during that trip, it has a natural coherence, but there is also a wonderful variation in materials, concept, and execution, which gives the show a satisfying sense of depth and breadth. There is even one digital piece—"Salutation," a short film of Dzegede doing a sun salutation on the summer solstice at midnight—yet it does not at all feel out of place among work that is hand-woven, hand-dyed, or assembled from objects found in nature.
The central concept of "Fare Well" is the Scandinavian turf house, which Dzegede researched intensely when she was in Iceland. "A lot of my work is about home, and the question of what is home—because for me, it's not a place," she says. "That's why a lot of my work has to do with travel and why I like traveling so much." Torfbærinn I+II are a pair of miniature portraits of turf houses made with tiny glazed ceramic bricks, grass, and artificial turf; Berjum, Bein, og Blóm are ceramic versions of lamb-bone spindles Dzegede saw on display at turf house museums, wound with yard she dyed with native Icelandic plants. But these are not just recreated artifacts: they are objects describing how an artist is transformed by her environment as she moves through it. For Local Color (Icelandic Kente), Dzegede wove hand-dyed wool into African kente cloth, metaphorically looming together her experiences in Iceland with her Ghanian heritage. Crow (Pottkökur II) and Snail and Tortoise (Pottkökur I) were inspired by bread molds at turf house museums, but are stamped with proverbs of her own choosing. "One is an English proverb, 'The crow went abroad, and came back just as black.'" she says. "The other one is like a Ghanian proverb: 'When the snail goes abroad, it finds shelter with the tortoise.' Then in the center there are symbols that refer back to the proverb. With the crow, it's handcuffs—being tied to its identity, even though it goes abroad—and then the other one is a symbol for interconnectedness and finding commonality, this idea that there are other people out there that carry their sense of home with them."
Dzegede says one of the first things she did upon arriving in Iceland was to seek out traditions that could be applied to an art practice, such as tying fishing nets. "Someone at the residency put me in touch with a man who is the manager of a marine research facility," Dzegede says. "He'd actually never made nets, just repaired them on boats as a teenager, so he knew how they worked, but he'd never made one from scratch. So we got in his truck, and he took me to his father's house, and we went in his garage, and he taught me how to make nets." Again, this old craft is interpreted in a wonderfully poetic and sideways manner; for Veiddur, she wove a net from sugar kelp. Weighted Net combines dyed yarn, rope, ceramics—and a piece of Mississippi driftwood that Dzegede found on Skinker. That sparkle of serendipity also shines through in Broken Buoy: During a walk, Dzegede discovered a yellow plastic buoy shattered by someone's impromptu target practice session. She began to piece it back together, then decided to leave it partially shattered, copper-leafing the exterior and filling the interior with indigo powder. A piece of rope she found wedged between rocks on the seashore was dyed with indigo and native plants and titled Northern Dock, evoking the dock she used as dye, as well as the idea of ships coming in from sea, and the polarity of north and south.
"Addoley's practice is somewhat anthropological," says fort gondo director Jessica Baran. "As someone who travels extensively, she is an acute observer of the environments and cultures she enters. Rather than bringing with her an agenda and set of materials for that place, her practice depends on a requisite openness to what she may confront. Then, she looks closely at these places and internally notes what defines that place as well as what specifically appeals to her. In the case of 'Fare Well,' this includes the native plants she used to make the dyes in her woven pieces; it also includes the kelp, drift wood, buoys and other oddly gorgeous artifacts she found on her walks and explorations of Iceland. Then, she transforms these found objects through highly meticulous, craft-based labor, that allows her further time to both mentally absorb that place and import her own hand and narrative into them." (Hopefully this entices you to come down to Cherokee on Saturday, but if you can't make it: Dzegede has an exhibition in Columbia later this year.)
Next door at beverly, poet Philip Matthews and photographer David Johnson's two-year collaboration offers a very different, but complementary, experience in "Wig Heavier Than a Boot." Matthews, who is currently in residence at at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, earned his MFA in creative writing at Wash U, and is former Curator of Public Projects at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. He and Johnson actually met at gondo in 2010 when they took part in a performance piece created by Maggie Ginestra (creator of the late, great chapbook store Stirrup Pants, among other things). They also crossed paths frequently at Wash. U., where both were studying. They finally cemented their collaboration at a workshop organized by The Luminary on radical intention in creative practice.
"We were sitting around a campfire, and people went around and shared what their specific individual projects were," Johnson says. "After I shared, and Philip had shared, we were sitting around the campfire. Phil said he'd worked with a photographer previously, and I asked him, 'Would you want to work with another photographer?' One of our peers said, 'I think Dave wants to collaborate with you,' and he was like, 'Yeah, let’s do it.'"
Some backstory on what 'it' is: Johnson is photographing, in essence, two beings. One is Philip Matthews, poet; the other is Petal. If you went to "Petalbombing," at Paul Artspace in the fall of 2015, or went to the third exhibit at Granite City Art and Design District, you have met Petal. If not, she requires a little bit of introduction.
"She came up through The Pulitzer when we were doing Reset back in January 2014," Matthews explains. "We were going do a drag show, which was sort of my contribution to that program series, so I was starting to go to more drag shows...I was interested in this idea of what would happen if you overlapped drag performance with poetry performance. At the same time, I was doing this first photographic collaboration with Carly Ann Faye at The Enamel project on Morgan Ford in April 2014. Petal wasn't really at the center of that, but she just sort of came in as that project was happening." It was at Faye's suggestion that Matthews began to write poetry out of the experience of becoming Petal, which is much more than donning clothing and makeup (in the exhibition notes for "Wig," she's described as "a consciousness who calls herself Petal.") Recently, Matthews was talking with "kind of a psychic who works with botanicals," about his writing practice. He mentioned Petal, and she told him that Petal had been with him for a long, long time—through several lifetimes, in fact. Matthews says he's not sure he subscribes to that, but says Petal is definitely much more than a drag persona. "It makes for an interesting poetry practice to ask, 'OK, who is this woman and what is her relationship to me?'" he says. "At times, it feels like a parental relationship. At times it feels like an alter ego. At times it feels like she’s my mischievous friend who like gets me into trouble. I think that she definitely does have a backstory, and the poems as well as the photos are ways for me to cast her in different scenarios and just see how does that feel? Then looking at the objective record, whether it’s the poem or a photograph, and sort of stitching all of those pieces together into a biography for her."
From the beginning, Johnson says, the photographs were meant to be more than just portraits, and to capture something performative—the process of Matthews becoming, and being, Petal. "We had an idea of a big Mad Hatter Tea Party Meets Andy Warhol with Petal in the middle of the woods kind of thing," he says, "but the photographs turned out to be a lot more introspective." The final 18 images that comprise the exhibit are stripped-down, black-and-white prints that don't feel performative or theatrical; they feel like candid portraits, documenting a life. Or, rather, lives: Johnson's photographs are astonishing in that they feel like they are capturing two very different beings over what feels like a much larger span of time than two years. In some, Matthews looks as young as a teenager; yet Petal, in some shots, is weary and matronly. A handful of images document the process of Matthews becoming Petal. There is only one straightforward photograph of Matthews—one in which he's engaged in the act of writing—that perfectly resembles the poet as he is in the world. The others feel uncanny and magical, like photographs smuggled in from some alternate reality. There's a large portrait of Petal with a headscarf at the beach (looking very Viriginia Woolf) and a photograph of her standing on the roof of a very weathered, almost medieval-looking building. Some of the images don't include a human figure at all.
"Originally they were just shots where I’d tell Philip, take a break, I'm going to make this shot just for me, because it was a great landscape, or great lighting," Johnson says of those images. "But when we were editing, I thought they served as a visual break—there’s a lot of portraiture. But Petal is of the landscape, too—even when she’s not in the poem or the photograph, she’s still there. She still occupies that space in a different way."
Johnson adds that the choice to use prints of varying sizes and hang them at different sight lines across the gallery wall was very deliberate, to create a timeless, nonlinear narrative. "I don’t think there’s one single narrative," he says. "There are multiple narratives that you can mix and match within that body of work. There's also a rhythm and a cadence to the way Philip delivers his poems—I wanted the show to have several different heights and sizes to allude to that idea of delivery and rhythm within poetry."
Matthews says the title—which he and Johnson collaborated on—preps the audience for the surreal world of the photographs and poems (which you can read on the gallery wall, as well as in a small chapbook, and hear performed in a video performance piece, "Crown and Crowning"). He adds that "the other aspect of it is asking, OK, when is a wig heavier than a boot? When would a boot be on your head? The idea of hate crimes came to me—so much of the project is about putting Petal, as a gender-queer body, in environments that are rural. That's an environment that is simultaneously home to me and a place where I feel at best out of place, and at worst, derogated or threatened."
There were times when that uneasy feeling was part of the photo shoot—for instance, the photograph of Petal on the roof, which was shot at Fort Macon in North Carolina. Johnson and Matthews shot it in December, with hopes for an empty beach—and ended up surrounded by tourists. Matthews, in his purple wig, felt profoundly vulnerable and uneasy. He points out, though, that in the photo, Petal's posture suggests defiance; she dominates the image. And in the final photograph in the series—a photograph that includes a campfire, appropriately enough—Petal gets her revenge on the photographer. Johnson is in the photo, nude and vulnerable, as Petal stares him down.
"She’s the one who’s dominating and in charge of that photo, and the gaze is being directed at him, and so there was a kind of place in my mind that felt like the entire project just imploded on itself, and I really like it," Matthews says. "There’s a refusal of the gaze next to like a redirecting of the gaze. Which I think, In my mind was the end of the collaboration." Or at least this collaboration. Johnson says that the next step, hopefully, is to assemble the images and the text into a book with additional photographs. And down the line, take the exhibition to other cities.
Both "Wig Heavier Than a Boot" and "Fare Well," are poignant final exhibits for this space that has, over the years, given talented young artists their first solo shows; provided a forum for more established artists to experiment; made a space for all kinds of voices to be heard; and sustained an environment where weird magic was not just possible, but probable. Other kinds of weird magic will manifest in other places—this is St. Louis, after all—but we will definitely miss the particular flavor of it that made gondo, gondo.
See "Fare Well" and "Wig Heavier Than a Boot," on Saturday, January 7; gallery hours begin at noon, followed by a closing reception from 6-9 p.m. Dzegede will give an artist's talk at 7 p.m., and at 8:15 p.m., Matthews will give a reading—via Skype—including poems in the show as well as new work. (Find all the details on the Facebook event page here.) Fort gondo is located at 3151 Cherokee, and beverly is located at 3155 Cherokee. For more information, go to fortgondo.com.
