Art Reviews
She Has a Big Heart’ is one of the more poignant door-sized paintings I’ve seen from musician and visual artist Jeff Bell. It’s a unique departure from his usual abstractions into the figurative, and in my opinion it is a successful departure.
Crouched in a fetal position, enwombed in a seeming vacuum of space, is an indefinite figure—the woman with a big heart. It appears to be the remains of a body, rather than a living body. Her flesh is diaphanous, exposing her large heart (her fatal cardiomyopathy?). We see her bones as if in x-ray.
"She Has A Big Heart"
by Jeff Bell
Various glyphs have been carved, more than written, into the black field that surrounds her. Some of these glyphs are pure abstraction. Others are clearly symbols, but we are denied the key to their translation. There are tick marks, like some primitive accountant’s ledger book. Now and again we come across a lone letter or a number, and, of course, there is the phrase, written in whole, from which the title of the piece is derived. We are left to impose our own subjective interpretation onto these glyphs.
It is this relationship, between the figure and the pseudo-writing that charges the work with meaning for me. There is a beautiful sadness in this relationship; the figure brought to her knees as the collective of human knowledge and accumulation of cultural detritus closes in around her. And finally, the undecipherable marks, which seem to symbolize the semiotic fickleness and non-absolutism of human thought, are brought into stark contrast with the reality of the applied vertebrae. This seems to betray where the artist’s ultimate loyalty lies.
As we gaze at the thin band of blue that is emblazoned across the length of the piece (all that seems to ground the figure in the black space that surrounds her) a zigzagging line slowly reveals itself. It’s reminiscent of a pulse line on an electrocardiograph machine, insinuating that, despite my initial reading, this figure’s heart beats still.
"Katsu!! III" & "Scary Mary's Ivy"
by Aurelio Villa Luna Diaz
Aurelio Villa Luna Diaz only recently began sharing his many creative talents with Mansfield’s budding art scene, but is quickly proving to be one of the most interesting of our local artists. I’ve been impressed with his poetry, which I’ve heard him read at Main Street Book’s monthly poetry/prose open mic. His poems explore a mélange of racial and class perspectives. I get the feeling that Identity, for Diaz, is not as simple as our bureaucratic forms seem to imply (check one; Caucasian, African American, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American).
He's a recontextualizing cowboy (…I’ve seen him in cowboy boots!). His poems buck and twist one marginalized perspective after another, but he skillfully rides them through to the end—winning, I believe, a better understanding of his own identity. Diaz is full of chic, entertaining lingo, but don’t think that a certain trendy turn of phrase is all he has to offer. When you least expect it his verse will give way to startling, sometimes confounding images and deeply compelling emotion.
I’ve outlined his poetry because I believe it offers us some insight into his visual art. I would like to discuss two of his photographs that are currently featured in the Fluid Bodies/Graven Images show at Relax, It’s Just Coffee; ‘Katsu!! III’ and ‘Scary Mary’s Ivy’.
Issues of identity seem central, not only to Diaz’s poetry, but also to his photography. In ‘Katsu!! III’ the artist is also the model. His face is painted geisha-white and his hair is gathered up with hairpins. On first look it seems obvious, to me, that Diaz is taking on the identity of a geisha. This seems appropriate since the word geisha translates into ‘performance artist’ and Diaz’s art seems to be a performance in protean identity.
Unable to make sense of the title, ‘Katsu!! III’, I did a google search and quickly earned a PHD in Cantonese from Wikipedia. The literal translation of Katsu means to yell or shout. It’s a practice used by Zen Buddhists to shock students out of their normal state of experience. Used at the right moment, Katsu can jolt a student beyond reasoned and rational thought and into the experience of Satori, or sustained enlightenment. Katsu is also similar to the practice used in martial arts of focusing energy through the guttural shout “kiai”. Taking my newly acquired understanding of the title into account, it would seem plausible that Diaz is not (only) assuming the role of Geisha, but (also) a role akin to Samurai—a warrior poet, whose incantation will usher anyone with ears to hear into a state of sustained enlightenment. This ambivalence must be intentional, as it seems to me to be the primary thread in Diaz’s artistic narrative.
In “Scary Mary’s Ivy” a naked doll (Mary) is seated in a chair in the woods. The doll’s blonde hair is green with moss. Tendrils of ivy are wrapped around her, binding her to the seat. At any moment I expect her to be swallowed up by the earth. It’s a common trope; the artificial assimilated into the natural world. Displayed, however, in the context of an exhibition of figure studies this photograph strikes me as fiercely authentic. Keeping in mind the issues of Identity that seem to be at the heart of Diaz’s work, we have to ask ourselves what Diaz believes “Scary Mary” reveals to us about our own identity. Mary contains only air, after all, beyond her 1/8 inch polymer injected skin. It is because of this absence of innate personality that a doll is the perfect ‘blank screen’ for the projection of little girls’ daydreams. The doll is always the passive receiver of an outside identity. They do not decide their identity, it is imposed upon them.
If we follow this line of investigation, it seems that Diaz is refuting the idea of innate identity in favor of a culturally constructed identity that is highly malleable. In a world where identity is pre-scripted according to race, geography, gender, and sexual orientation, Diaz’s art becomes an exercise in burning the damn script.
Do you hear his Katsu call? It’s a breathy Bruce Lee like shriek, “Whoami.”
Jason Kaufman