However, you won’t see overtly religious imagery if you visit The moonlight was behind them...; in part, because the title of this exhibition finds its root in the gothic novel Dracula by Bram Stoker with an ominous darkness that Rollins and K.O.S. think relates to our current political and social condition.
Rollins’ collaboration with the members of K.O.S. takes the form of drawings, sculptural objects, paintings on canvas and paper. They highlight quotes from books, plays, operas and prose with which they engage as they relate the stories to their own experiences or to politics. Their art is created directly on these inspirational texts.
In this exhibition: “Gretchen am Spinnrade (after Goethe and Schubert) reflects on the swooning for Faust by Gretchen, distracted by her treadle. With the Brothers Grimm tale Rumpelstiltskin, the spinning of straw into gold hints at the blind pursuit of material splendour in a late capitalist period that might be seen to discourage critical thought. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. also revisit George Orwell's Animal Farm, with the relevance of the allegorical narrative only becoming more potent since its original publication. Other work makes reference to Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774.”
Although they have engaged, on other occasions, with religious texts and imagery – as with I See the Promised Land or The Temptation of Saint Anthony – the religious underpinning of their work is not primarily found in their use of symbolism. Rather, it concerns their processes of creation.
These involve reading and researching inspirational texts in order to find images that make literature visible. K.O.S. artist Robert Branch has spoken of this process as one which involves struggle in a social experience. He says, “Art making doesn’t come with written instructions, with a step-by-step process.” Instead, you “just kind of feel it out” because art “is a process of faith.” In this way, Rollins suggests, you “become an instrument for something that cannot be articulated any other way.” “Like the paint, you’re a medium” for “some spirit … making something manifest.” This process of faith, Rollins says, is about making “the invisible visible, vision becoming visible, and making hope material, power manifest, and Spirit sensuous.”
Rollins is “an active member in the music, arts, and HIV/AIDS ministries at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem” and draws deeply on his church experiences in discussing art as a process of faith. He speaks about Holy Ghost moments saying that people “underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit”: “We don’t make this work. It is not like speaking in tongues. It is the Holy Spirit present … Painting is capable of rapture. Our paintings are ecstatic utterances made material and visible.”
So, if you want to experience rapture, spiritual ecstasy and, even, the “glory of God,” then this exhibition based on horror, fairy tale and political allegory may be just the place to go.
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The Voices of East Harlem - Simple Song Of Freedom.
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