Sonya Clark—Coiffed, Tangled: “The Hair Craft Project” by Robert Sparrow Jones

We sometimes visit the hair salon for change, almost as if we are asking for a new identity. Hair not only comprises our physical appearance but it marks out our lives with various styles and length. Molecularly, hair follicles contain our actual DNA, but also, somehow, our spiritual selves. Using hair as subject matter, contemporary fiber artist Sonya Clark weaves a cultural tapestry of the very fabric of our community. Physically, she allows for a mindful build-up of elaborate textures that, in many ways, represent a landscape of places and people. Inherently, a history is formed—a tactile topography where a wealth of cultural wisdom emerges from Clark’s mind and through the collaborative hands of other artisans.

Trained as a fiber artist, Sonya Clark draws from her heritage. Specifically—materially, through her interest in African American hair. Her series “The Hair Craft Project” encompasses photography and fiber arts where Clark introduces something very beautiful, selfless, and unexpected. In the spirit of collaboration and with craftswomen in mind, Clark digs deep into her personal communities to invite hairstylists to use her head…as a canvas.

“Hairdressers are my heroes. The poetry and politics of Black hair care specialists are central to my work as an artist and educator. Rooted in a rich legacy, their hands embody an ability to map a head with a comb and manipulate the fiber we grow into complex form. These artists have mastered a craft impossible for me to take for granted.”

Hairstylists/barbers are important, prominent occupations in our local communities. Like any serious discipline, styling and grooming hair is a complicated and time-enveloping craft. Close relationships inevitably form through ritual and vanity. These bonding friendships come across beautifully in this exhibit. The works comprising “The Hair Craft Project” manifest in an intimate narrow gallery space at the heart of The Fed Galleries, Kendall College of Art and Design. One side of the long gallery space is lined with ten large-scale photographs, the opposite side contains the paired wall weavings on canvas of similar size. The photographs themselves, with their saturated backgrounds, are forces. In each image, Clark stands with her back to the viewer, prominently modeling every unique hairstyle design as if she were a walking sculpture. The design is foremost, close, tight-weaved and revealing the sculptural contours of Clark’s head. To the left in the the photographs, the individual hairdresser proudly addresses the viewer. Featured in this series are Kamala Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita Hill Moses, Nasirah Muhammad, Jameika and Jasmine Pollard, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha Superville, and Jamilah Williams.

On the opposite side of the narrow gallery, so that they are paired with each photograph, the wall weavings stand as interpretive works executed by each of the hairdressers represented in the photograph. These works are slightly less traditional and yet magnificent personal abstract art. Each wall weaving consists of a stretched canvas substrate, square and minimal, clearing the stage for each complex sculptural weaving. Clark’s materials of threads or cords have a linear, pliable element and the softness of the crocheted, knotted, sculptural forms are textures that invite the hand. Because their scale is human, if we imagine we are able to act upon our impulses, it would be an intimate stroke. The crowns of our heads have spiritual connotations. A life force flows from the top of our heads. This is a place of thought, conjuring love, where a halo might be symbolized, and brings up vivid storytelling, such as the tale of Samson and Delilah, and Rapunzel.

The dark silk thread representing hair, particularly, African American hair, is inventive, playful, and very powerful. Close up, their varied patterns are keenly manipulated into buttresses; coils of twisting braids curve like fingers that seek to identify and enhance points of connection and tension. It’s as if, through Clark’s methodologies, she expresses that even as we try to impose our will on nature, nature imposes its anarchy back on us. Here Clark engages us with these works as abstract art but also these are contemporary cultural artifacts that reference history in multi-facets of intersecting threads and braids.

Every skillful hair tapestry adeptly explores certain personal symbolic interpretations of each craftswomen. And yet, we are all part of a vast tapestry. Through materials and processes Clark’s art contains wonderful accounts of the ways in which the artists and craftspeople of our immediate community come together to form our cultural landscape. And because the thread takes us adeptly to the larger metaphors: warp and weft becomes identity, and family, community, the workplace, and the world. Here is where life inevitably tangles. And “The Hair Craft Project” does it so elegantly. Exploring the importance of urban place for identity and individuals, Clark touches human lives, our lives. On the tangle-braiding of community, cultural value is expressed appropriately as “The Hair Craft Project” is centered in the context of the larger exhibition series, “I AM: Money Matters” focusing on currency, consumption, and value.*

Viewing photographs of actual sculpted hair and then physically exploring the wall weavings in “The Hair Craft Project” transforms the familiar into a metaphorical construct. Crossing through the images and weavings I imagine a space that follows a meticulous and yet open conceptual map. Here I envision a community that contains all human cultures, addressing class, race, and identity. It is through this acknowledgement that Clark highlights the talents embedded within the landscape of her community and culture. Or rather, she surrenders to the beautiful hand of community. “The Hair Craft Project” exemplifies a dedication to craft, especially in the fiber arts, where weaving, stitching, and adorning with feminine sensibility shows us that an arduous craft is imbued with a sense of time and stirred with storytelling. In doing so, these embroidered threads contain the pattern of time.

There are many threads that run throughout our lives. The very fabric of our culture is a complex tapestry of these threads crossing and weaving. Everything around us is in constant flux. In life, nothing is ever really fixed in place but rather everything interacts in dynamic relationships, especially as we settle for a while in the communities in which we reside. We all touch, all walks of life; these threads snag and tangle—ignorance, self interest, cultural indifference, dogmatic and outdated belief systems that are not our own to begin with. But as we take hold of the thread of life, we should be careful because we touch others. By holding onto these threads of life, we leave ourselves the chance to find our own way, though all the while we should caution ourselves that we touch others. When this happens, we weave tapestries.

* Clark was co-winner of the 2014 ArtPrize Grand Juried Prize. This was the first year the Juried Grand Prize panel actually decided on a split of the $200,000 prize. (Her co-winner was Anila Quayyum Agha’s excellent meditative installation, “Intersections”).

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2015/02/sonya-clark-coiffed-tangled-the-hair-craft-project/

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/author/robert-sparrow-jones/

Symptomatic Constant: Julie Schenkelberg, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, November, 2014

The first tinge of autumn spiked the air as the streets of downtown Grand Rapids teemed with artgoers for ArtPrize, 2014. A curious line had already formed down Ionia Street, excitedly inching toward the doors of the old Morton House which was once an opulent 1920s hotel. After bankruptcy and a stint as rent-subsidized housing, the place has been vacant and boarded up, save for this year’s excellent SiTE:LAB exhibition.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Installation View 1,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

When I entered the multistoried ghost of a hotel, a continuous dank breeze pushed against the inside corridor, a short and dark walk under disintegrating ceilings with ominous gaping steel-meshed holes and crumpling plaster corners. The central lobby then opened up to a spectacularly dusty and ambient light where, encompassed by the walls of curling paint, Julie Schenkelberg’s sublime installation “Symptomatic Constant” sat corpulently like a shipwreck.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Piano View, 2014

Within the materials lies Schenkelberg’s remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. “Symptomatic Constant” is a massive work. It starts as rubble on the marble floor with plaster dust and shards of ceramic, resembling a shore of beach glass, then steadily the work grows up into the high space of the lobby’s ceiling with fabric draped from an old cast-iron heating register. Schenkelberg builds in layers with architectural salvage culled from the site itself as well as local thrifting. Her cultural archeology is distinctive in its details and restless as the whole of her ship-like installation.

Schenkelberg is a collector. She has an eye for timelessness in the materials she selects and remains an architect of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or recovery in any conventional sense. Rather, her voice in this work feels like that of survival, which is manifest in her abstracted ship-run-aground form. In materials, I feel her central obsession is not to preserve the past but rather to borrow it, paint with it, use it as her expression. Her incredible wonder of the antiquation plays on the collective memory of our object’s past. She rescues the perishing for a reason. The curation of materials contains a spirit, a ghost, a memory. Whether it be a worn-out grand piano (original to the hotel) or stacks of indiscrete linens, the materials resonate above their own presence. Schenkelberg’s work here is an adventure, comprised of her poetic collections without being precious. She acts as a poet who describes with pale, faded metaphors to build a wonderfully strange atmosphere.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 3, 2014

Looking at her work, you can envision Schenkelberg developing a specific language of things in new and surprising ways like a painter. She has a rich vocabulary of ethereal, antiquated items, such as milk glass, stacked valises, and tattered leather-bound books. She amends them with chalky robin’s egg blue and pink pastel paint the consistency of cake icing, taken from the cues of a delicately crumbling architecture. Rendered further, you can see the artist’s expression in the repetition of drilled holes, slashing cut marks, and smashed ceramic. Her hand denotes an authority that immediately gains the viewer’s trust. Her fiction envelops us in a sublimity, where even the heavy mildew fragrance of wet plaster from the old hotel’s depths adds to the authenticity.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 4,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 6, 2014

While the mythic analogies swelled up in a hull of archaic architectural sinew, I wondered what side of the story we may bring ourselves. This fiction is a dazzle but can offer more than just a touch of fatalism. It quickly brought to mind, “The Raft of Medusa,” 1818-1819, Théodore Géricault’s iconic masterpiece of French Romanticism. Géricault’s painting depicts the aftermath of a warship wreck off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Due to a shortage of lifeboats, 147 people were left behind to fend for themselves on a makeshift raft. They drifted for 13 days before the rescue of only 10 survivors. The disaster worsened by starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism that ensued and each of the figures in the painting tells the story. Géricault assiduously researched the horrific, then contemporary, incident and was able to question survivors. He even sketched them as well. Géricault built wax models and figurines and had the original carpenter of the Medusa build a scale model of the raft. He studied cadavers and body parts, visited hospitals and beaches—there is no mistaking his obsession for detail in his many sketches. It’s famously captured in the final larger-than-life painting as two intersecting pyramids of figures. On the left side, death is darkly descending in the expiration of life from an improvised mast against a foreboding weather system. On the right is hope in the ascension of bodies to the waving flag at a passing ship. Horrific and fascinating. There is no real resolve. Perhaps there is just a tinge of hope in the light and passing distant ship.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 2, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Front View, 2014

Schenkelberg is less topical in her shipwreck, but her intention and process are as tenuous, just as obsessed. Julie Schenkelberg grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by the beauty of decaying architecture, slate-gray skies, and rusted steel. Her relentless fascination is evident in her process of seeking out and curating distinct objects. Yes, these items are ubiquitous except these objects carry a history, these objects have souls. Scrap metal yards, thrift shops, estate sales, construction dumpsters, attics, and basements—her preparation is an active and continuous search. After gathering the appropriate materials she organizes by size, color, material, like a gigantic painter’s palette.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 5, 2014

It makes sense to prepare for something this grand. Becoming intimate with the materials, Schenkelberg understands their properties physically and unveils their spirit. When they are pulled from the palette, each component is sensitive to space, attuned to the unique surroundings at hand in the creation of a sublime work both beautiful and frightening. Gericult worked hard in the gathering, he used it in a realistic style, but ultimately he was after raw emotion. Schenkelberg’s emotion is palatable in the tactile. She creates moments of startling presence where everyday facts are magical, visual in our own memory.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

To the front of the lobby, sweeping staircases with Art Deco railings lead to several mezzanine level spaces with balconies overlooking the ballroom like porticos from the heavens. Beneath the fading, elaborate, delicately frescoed ceilings, “Symptomatic Constant,” exquisite in its construction of reclaimed detritus, lies romantically shipwrecked on the dusty travertine marble floor. Here are two intersecting pyramids: a crumpled ground plane elegantly shifting in tone and a pyramid of architecture thrusting upward in a hull and a sail—uncertain and intensive. From this vantage, it was appropriate to watch as patrons, beneath the ruined sky of repeated arches, discover its evasive edges. “Symptomatic Constant” resonates on this scale, alluding to a work even more vast and disquieting. It reminds us that loss is profound and that the conclusion, though ethereal, is ultimately survival in the ascension.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/11/julie-schenkelberg-builds-shipwrecks-of-hope-symptomatic-constant/

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Bird’s-Eye View, 2014