Most of these reviews are from the Charleston City Paper, where I was a critic and contributing arts editor for several years, writing over a million words about theatre, film, visual art, and other cultural fun and games.

VISUAL ARTS ‌ Ego Trip

by Nick Smith January 11, 2006

Simon Norfolk: Et in Arcadia Ego
On view through Feb. 18, 2006
Opening reception Jan. 13, 2006
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Simons Center for the Arts
54 St. Philip St.
www.halsey.cofc.edu

Simon Norfolk’s photographs are awesome in the original sense of the word. Not, like, awesome in a “dude” way but awesome as in filled with his sense of it. They’re powerful, sometimes scary, and always impressive.

Take his work from Bleed, a book on the mass graves of Bosnia. Village populations were gunned down by the Serbs and buried in pits; in a post-war flurry of obfuscation, the bodies were bulldozed and re-interred in secret locations.

Norfolk took his camera to one of those locations — Crny Vrh — but he didn’t just document what he saw. He created abstract icescapes, including one with a disturbing red coloration. “That image is quite beautiful,” says co-curator Mark Sloan. “It’s powerful because it works on so many levels. It’s a haunting elegy to the hundreds if not thousands of bodies buried beneath the surface. It reflects the nature of what atrocity is and how it can be covered up by the land.”

Sloan co-curated Norfolk’s last Halsey show, Afghanistan: Palimpsest, held on the first anniversary of 9/11. Since then the artist has traveled the world, capturing the destructive effect of war on landscapes with a breathtaking tonal depth.

“My best efforts look like paintings,” says Norfolk, whose vistas connote landscape masters like Claude Lorraine, John Martin and JMW Turner. “They have a sense of texture and place. They’re nothing like pow-pow-pow news photography.”

Norfolk strives to give an opposite view of the received idea of what war zones should look like. “I wanted to get away from the tired motifs that we’re used to,” he says, “the refugee camp clichés of white gloves on little black baby’s bellies, or nose cone footage of a bomb flying through Osama Bin Laden’s front door. My work is anti-telly, anti-news photography. TV viewers have no real sense of what Afghanistan was, that it was a landscape in crisis. It was extraordinary how they had no idea what it was really like after watching hours of footage. I don’t have a TV at the moment, and it’s like unchaining yourself from a mad horse.”

The new Halsey show is a greatest hits collection of Norfolk’s work over the last four years, gathered during visits to Iraq, Bosnia, Normandy, Liberia, Israel, Palestine, and Africa.

“I look like a pillock with my bald head, Hawaiian shirt, and bizarre camera,” says Norfolk. “A harmless dickhead. If I wandered round with a TV camera or a small Nikon I’d be murdered or chased off. I’m amazed that these news photographers dress like soldiers — they’re just asking to be shot at by a sniper. Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain view.” His brazen attitude has helped him to generate images that seethe with personal frustration and compassion.

A shot taken at Hussain Khil, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, is dominated by a black plume of smoke from dark red brickworks. Sunlight gives the smoke its own brownish hue, and the landscape is a mix of volcanic towers and green crops. In another photograph, a colorful victory arch leads to a mountainous area with niches carved in the rock. The lonely arch is guarded by a single sentry who practically blends into the background, his head turned away from the camera.

The sentry could almost be one of the goat herders in Norfolk’s depiction of Agshar, looking down on the devastated Hazara neighborhood in western Kabul. Ruined rows of stone houses stretch into the background, while the herders echo the innocent subjects of Nicholas Poussin’s 17th Century painting, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” aka “The Arcadian Shepherds.” In this manner, the pastoral meets the pulverized.

While Norfolk’s 2002 exhibition at the Halsey juxtaposed his images with Afghani textiles, his new show has a distinct context of political science and social studies (co-curator Mark Long is an assistant professor of Political Science at College of Charleston).

“Norfolk has been working on this project for ten years,” says Mark Sloan. “During that time he’s been engaged in the idea of the effects of war on the landscape. That’s a layer that’s visible in his work, but there’s a subtext — what this is doing to us as humans. He’s a humanist, and I think his photos are a form of activism.”

Simon Norfolk presented a free artist’s lecture at Physicians Auditorium on Thurs., Feb. 16, 2006 at 7 p.m.

VISUAL ARTS ‌ Text Messages

by Nick Smith January 10, 2007

Carolina Umbra
On view through Sat. Jan. 21, 2007
City Gallery at Waterfront Park
34 Prioleau St., 958-6484

The best kind of retrospective art shows aren’t perfect at all. They’re fascinating because of their flaws, not despite them. They indicate periods in an artist’s life where new styles are tried, challenges are met and overcome, progress is made, in a carefully curated reflection of our own lives.

Recently, the City Gallery at Waterfront Park’s been hot on looking back. During Piccolo Spoleto 2006, William McCullough’s show (curated by his daughter, Currie) included early work — even a couple of childhood attempts — in his successful Southern Painter exhibition. The layout had a geographical element, showing how McCullough’s life in urban, rural, or mountainous regions affected his work. A few months later, artist Yaw Owusu Shangofemi’s blacksmithed sculptures dotted the gallery in Forging Spirits. The selection focused on the range of his work rather than a clear-cut chronology.

At present the gallery’s given over its entire space to the art of Mary Walker, who’s used literature to inspire some of her most accomplished work. Core inspiration for this show comes from S.C. Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth’s new poem “Carolina Umbra.” Its simply structured, roiling lines capture the destructive power of Hugo, which leaves the poet marveling at its aftermath. In her poem, the hurricane leaves a hellish landscape of fire, smoke, sundered steel, and shattered windows left agape like a crowd of hungry mouths. It’s not a pretty image.

Walker manages to find the beauty within the chaos in her identically titled drawing and collage series. Behind stark shapes of black-crusted blood red, a hopeful glimmer of clear white can be seen. There will be calm after the storm.

Walker manages to pack these collages with a great sense of scale without losing a personal perspective. Her sense of place is carefully balanced with emotional expression. In contrast, the simpler drawing, print, and collage pieces in the show look like much earlier experiments, with rough-edged, clumsier shapes that suggest a folk art sensibility. But no, her “Sugarlift Birds” and “The Marjorys” series were created in 2006, just like “Carolina Umbra.” The latter series is strong enough to make an impression in its own right without its smaller, less accomplished companions.

While the sense of linear progression isn’t always obvious, Walker isn’t afraid to display her imperfections. She tries different media, develops series over months or years, fueled all the while by her love of literature. She directly refers to Wentworth, as well as more esteemed sources: the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare; there’s a paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno right next to her ink and woodcut interpretations of the cantica. It’s easy to imagine her getting excited about the text and rushing over to transfer her passion onto canvas.

Although Walker doesn’t see her show as a retrospective — she describes it merely as “work I haven’t shown before” — there are examples of art from earlier decades: naïve oils from the ’80s, chunky linocuts from the ’90s, plus three decades-spanning “Carolina Gold” pieces, pencil-and-watercolor works in progress that suggest a community built on the blood and bones of less fortunate predecessors. In “Carolina Gold Blue,” for example, scenes of rural life mingle with large pencil corpses.

Walker’s dark visions explain why she was drawn to Wentworth’s poem, and her choice of subject helped make her a likely candidate for last year’s $5,000 Donna and Mike Griffith Lowcountry Artist’s Fund Award, administered by the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina. The Griffiths annually sponsor a local artist to create new work that reflects life in the Lowcountry. Last winter, Walker submitted a written proposal and six slides of her art, but wasn’t sure whether she’d follow through on the project. “I’m not a landscaper,” she says. “I almost didn’t do it.” Before she even knew if she’d won the award, she started on her project to prove to herself that she was really committed to seeing it through.

The completed show, curated by past gallery coordinator Catherine Heitz New, is intermittently dark, optimistic, intriguing, and a little rough around the edges — much like the Lowcountry it does its best to evoke.

Local artists shouldn’t have to struggle to make a living

by Nick Smith December 29, 2010

You don’t have to be an art lover to recognize we’ve got hot creative talent in this town. Our festivals alone show that we can deliver the goods on a professional, culturally edifying level. So why don’t our artists, performers, and producers get the support they deserve?

With each passing year, state funding seems to shrink, leaving artmakers to chase private donations and ticket sales. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, the projected arts legislative appropriations from the state of South Carolina next year are $2,290,382 — more than 25 percent less than 2010’s actual appropriations. That short-changes an important local employer: the artistic sector.

So far, more than $6 million has been handed out to train Boeing workers, a force that will be 3,800 strong. Compare that number to the findings of a 2010 research study funded by Charleston’s Creative Parliament, New Carolina, and the Charleston Regional Development Alliance: 27,315 workers were employed in creative endeavors in 2008. Less state funding means fewer art projects and fewer opportunities for locals unless, like too many Charleston artists, they’re prepared to work for free — something that no assembly plant worker in their right mind would be willing to do.

Somehow, artists find the will and passion to do just that, enriching the state with their creations. But they have to compromise. Over the past few years, I’ve seen painters make beautiful art that they have to store in the steamy outdoors because they can’t afford studio space, performers singing their hearts out for free, producers making shows on shoestring budgets, and theater companies (like Art Forms and Theatre Concepts) without a stage to call their own.

Among these artists, there’s a sense of camaraderie that encourages them to keep coming back. But economic reality doesn’t always allow that to happen. Dozens of fine actors, artists, and musicians have left town because they don’t get paid enough to live here or they just can’t afford the rent. A prime example: eminent sculptor Tom Durham, who told me point blank that he was leaving Charleston because the rent was too high for him here.

Lack of funding has forced artists to be extra resourceful, and if necessity is the mother of invention, then these kids must be the MacGyvers of the South. They make do with limited materials, use alternate marketing methods, and are very appreciative when they do get a hand out. The lack of excess cash also tempers any self-indulgent urges they may have, but they have bills to pay just like anyone else.

While the Charleston Symphony Orchestra is back in action, it still lacks aid from the state and corporate sector. “Unfortunately, in this economic climate many performing arts organizations are struggling financially,” CSO President Ted Legasey said in March. “We have seen a strongly negative effect on revenue as major contributions have decreased by more than 60 percent over last year.”

We need to give cruise ship visitors an alternative to picking through overpriced Market Street knickknacks. Art is part of Charleston’s alluring aesthetic, complementing the architecture and giving visitors a big reason to return. It’s about time the importance of local artists was recognized and suitably rewarded so that tourists and locals can benefit from their work for a long time to come.

VISUAL ARTS ‌ Framing the Year

by Nick Smith December 27, 2006

Keeping tabs on all the high-quality visual art that crops up around town can be tough on a guy, especially on a weekly schedule. There are well over 100 commercial galleries in town, two city galleries, and an array of alternative spaces; in recent months, shows have been held in a record store (52.5), pubs and restaurants (the Village Tavern, Vickery’s, Med Deli), and a hotel (the Market Pavilion).

As if that weren’t enough, some new contemporary galleries have opened this year: Danny McSweeney’s Spark Studios and Kristy Cifuentes’ Avondale-based Modernisme have both survived long enough to build up strong followings and a roster of talented progressive artists.

There’s also lots of worthy work beyond Charleston, including the outdoor sculpture exhibitions in North Chuck’s Riverfront Park and a good mix of public and fine art projects at 10 Storehouse Row. The Sumter County Gallery of Art has been hosting some increasingly strong shows that are begging for a mention. Right now Arturo Lindsay’s solo show Healing is up there, gracing the gallery’s walls with large-scale contemporary mixed-media pieces that reflect the African diaspora. The Columbia Museum of Art is proudly displaying Picasso’s Head of Man painting and is hosting a traveling Frank Lloyd Wright show dedicated to his graphic and decorative designs.

In other words, there’s a lot of good stuff to see out there — more than we can hope to squeeze into the CP. But we do try to cover all the major art happenings in Chucktown, and warn you about the stinkers, as well. This year has seen more than its fair share of those.

2006 started well with two rich, enthralling shows. The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art exhibited powerful, politically resonant photographs by Simon Norfolk, while the Gibbes Museum of Art tapped into local fondness for another photographer, Walker Evans, with the traveling Three Weeks in Cuba exhibition. The black and white images that Evans captured while visiting Cuba with Ernest Hemingway were enhanced by some of the writer’s personal ephemera, screenings of A Farewell to Arms, and one or two interactive elements. The show was even more impressive considering that the Gibbes had no executive director at the time (Betsy Fleming had departed the previous September), and her eventual replacement Todd Smith recognized the museum’s savvy staff by keeping them on and giving them clearly defined positions.

The quality of these shows set a high standard for rest of ’06. Disappointingly, that standard wasn’t always met. Redux Contemporary Art Center, also without a director at the top of the year, took a while to present a memorable show. Perhaps the sheer number of events it tried to organize — live music, documentary screenings, and 12 shows in as many months — meant that quantity would outweigh the quality.

Re:Invention, an attempt in January to get back to its roots with art by the Center’s studio renters, was coherent but tame. Another low-key offering, NATURE:Redrawn, also lacked any serious impact. Renee Van der Stalt, Talia Greene, and Christine Buckton Tillman did clever things with paper but failed to capture the true thrall and intricacy of their natural inspirations. With Seth Curcio now officially at the helm, Redux is picking up steam, offering more effective shows like the hand-printed Hot Pressed Poster Fest.

We can’t say the same for the City Gallery at the Dock Street Theatre, which has suffered from its limited wall space and a mostly uninspiring choice of art. We haven’t heard anything from Calvin Dilligard’s Culture Shock Movement since its overhyped, immaturely wrought Fusion of the Arts back in March. We also believed the billboard-heightened hype for the Gibbes’ Edward Hopper in Charleston, but there was only so much the museum could do with 12 watercolors. With a little more space and more emphasis on the important work of his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, this could have been the “landmark show” the Gibbes’ ad campaign promised.

The Halsey Institute hasn’t always come up trumps. Gallery space was devoted to some mostly unimaginative CofC student work in April’s annual Young Contemporaries. We were left with the impression that Director and Senior Curator Mark Sloan was so busy organizing the spectacular multigallery, multi-artist Force of Nature and preparing for a 2008 relocation that the Halsey was left to coast a little, but that’s only because of the high benchmark he’s set for the gallery in past years.

It’s been the privately owned local galleries that have put together some of the year’s most memorable shows. Currie McCullough risked 53 Cannon’s fine-art reputation on contemporary paintings (a Kevin Taylor retrospective), photography (Through a Glass Darkly), and even vinyl (May’s Munny Show). Nina Liu presented work by many of her favorite artists from her gallery’s 20-year existence; currently she’s featuring the paper lightshades of Smithsonian-bound Jocelyn Châteauvert, who tastefully blurs the line between art and functionality. And Sherry Browne’s Studio Open is always worth the trek to Folly Beach. Sonoko Mitsui’s installation there had as much aesthetic impact as any of the Force of Nature components, covering a similar theme of the artist’s personal relationship with the environment.

With their directors finally in place, Charleston’s art institutions can learn a lot from the hard-working, underappreciated gallery owners who have kept things ticking between major happenings.

VISUAL ARTS ‌ The Year in Visual Arts

by Nick Smith December 28, 2005

In a year when our readers voted the Market as the best place to buy art and the Gaillard still gets confused with the Gibbes, it’s worth taking a look back at Charleston’s array of exhibitions this year, which, despite it all, were remarkably diverse. If art is influenced by the context it’s viewed in, then the sheer number of different spaces used — from houses and hotels to gutted stores and offices — indicate local artists’ willingness to stretch their abilities and trust that art buyers won’t be too snotty about where they find their wares. It’s like asking a dog lover to buy a puppy in a back alley; if the pooch is good-looking enough, it’ll get plenty of attention.

Not all of 2005’s shows were city-bound. The number of galleries has grown to meet the increasing demand of newcomers and visitors to the area. The Gallery at Freshfields, in a brand-new village at the entrance to Seabrook and Kiawah Islands, is a good example of this. Owned by Robert Hicklin Jr., it specifically targets vacationers and opened before Freshfields Village was fully occupied. With a mix of representational oils, sculptures and photography and a high-tech viewing room, it represents a leap of faith for Hicklin as well as a chance to test ideas that might not fly in his more traditional Charleston Renaissance Gallery.

Similar risk-taking has led to the successful launch of new galleries in the city as well as some notable one-offs. At 53 Cannon Street Gallery, the McCullough family transformed a cozy house into a site for some innovative shows, including Women Having Fun (a benefit for the Center for Women) and their current All Seasons of South Carolina Landscape Painting. Featuring meticulous work from William McCullough and several other locals, the organizers have a habit of giving hackneyed themes (nudes, still lifes) a fresh twist. It doesn’t hurt to find the work displayed in innocuous settings that include the kitchen and bathroom.

Capitalizing on the continuing resurgence of Upper King, some unlikely spaces became outlets for talented artists like Seth Gadsden and Krist Mills, who ran The Floating, a wide-ranging multimedia show, in parallel with last spring’s Spoleto Festival. Their 5,000-square-foot space proved too small to hold their many artists’ ideas, with mounds of carpet bleeding into a back lot for a tree-sized installation by Shelby Davis.

Pieces of Sanity and Curious Tales were equally ambitious multimedia shows at the Humanities Center on Rutledge Avenue. Sanity had enough strong elements to carry its weak video art, while Tales combined original new music, poetry, visual art, film, and interactive installations, including a room with 3-D projections courtesy of Tripp Storm.

The influence of our institutional galleries was proved by an exhibition at the Gibbes. Henri Matisse’s work got plenty of international attention through retrospectives at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, coinciding with a continued interest in abstract art. This was reflected locally by Beyond Representation: Abstract Art in the South, a wide-ranging show with pieces by Matisse, Joan Miro, and Roy Lichtenstein alongside familiar local names.

“During Spoleto there were a lot of shows that highlighted abstract work,” says Brian Rutenberg, a College of Charleston grad now painting and exhibiting successfully in New York, “including the terrific exhibition at the Gibbes and one at the Ella Richardson Gallery on Broad Street. The response was very positive.”

Beyond Representation led viewers to Eva Carter’s non-representational gallery, and there was a distinct sense of crossover as she opened an abstract show last month, highlighting work by Carter, Michael Tyzack, and William Halsey, all of whom had work in the Gibbes exhibition.

Rutenberg also nipped down from New York to curate Cooperation of Pleasures, the Halsey’s intriguing contribution to the abstract milieu. While Julie Evans drew her inspiration from Indian miniatures with tiny, detailed gouache and acrylics on paper, Barbara Takenaga went large and cosmic with her hypnotic space scenes.

Sporting a new name, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art stated its intention to be an “adventurous and innovative venue.” Its crowning achievement this year has to be its collaboration with Redux Contemporary Art Center, Magar Hatworks, RTW, and the Music Farm during Spoleto for the Alive Inside sideshow spectacular, allowing each space to keep its own identity while retaining the strong theme of freaks as art objects. Ironically, the work involved in running the show put extra pressure on Kevin Hanley, who became Redux’s first executive director in March and quit the role before the dust had settled on Sawaguzo!, the first event he personally instigated. The gallery has yet to announce a replacement.

2005 provided opportunities to sample all the major media, with unique installations at the Halsey (ElseWHERE), Shimon Attie’s emotionally charged photography at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park for Piccolo, actor Billy Dee Williams’ airbrushed acrylic figures at the Richard James Galleries, and sound art at CofC’s Addlestone Library (an Arnold Schoenberg retrospective). While Charleston may not be known for innovation — tourist-targeting landscapes and figurative artworks continue to outweigh their contemporary cousins here — it’s clear local artists haven’t lost their inventive attitudes toward creating and showing their more progressive stuff.

Alison Piepmeier’s unique new book studies a text riot

by Nick Smith December 23, 2009

College of Charleston Assistant Professor Alison Piepmeier’s students are under pressure. They’re assailed on all sides by print media packed with images of perfectly formed, unblemished models with the power to make them feel unattractive or underrepresented. Piepmeier, who directs the Women and Gender Studies Program, has seen the serious effect this pressure can have on some of her undergrads.

“They’re facing some really serious body issues,” she says. “The college is recognized as having beautiful women. They feel there’s a certain way they need to look. That affects their quality of life in debilitating ways.”

But what if there were alternatives to those glossy perfect-world periodicals? What if women could create their own publications that reflected their own individual points of view? Piepmeier learned that a surprising number of females have fought back with zines, homemade magazines covering topics that are relevant to them and giving their lives a powerful punk twist.

Bringing these zines into her classroom, Piepmeier recognized their continuing popularity even in a time of blogs and social networking. When a New York University Press editor asked her if anyone had written a book on the subject, she found that nobody had. Her new book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism unearths the phenomenon, analyzing titles like Fragments of Friendship, Grit & Glitter, and I’m So Fucking Beautiful.

Although the current crop of photocopied or self-printed zines have their direct roots in the Riot Grrrl music scene of the early ’90s (Piepmeier often refers to them as grrrl zines), she traces their ancestry through the scrapbooks of the 19th century, mimeographed pamphlets in the ’70s, and the ornate handmade packaging that some zines have been shipped in over the years to give her academic subject extra validity. “I too had fallen into the mindset that these weren’t important enough to study on their own,” she says. By placing them in a greater historical context she was able to take them seriously in their own right. “Many zines I read are incredibly thoughtful and complex,” she adds. “They’re documents of feminist and female legacy.”

And what a legacy. These are reflections of life seen through an uncompromising prism of gender politics, a text riot of reportage, personal observations, stream-of-consciousness rants, pocket-sized poems, and collages, all presented in a do-it-your-damn-self anti-mainstream manner. East Village Inky is crammed with Ayun Halliday’s tales of life as a parent of young children. Jigsaw‘s manifesto calls for girls to assert their own identities. Figure 8, Shameless, and (our favorite title) Fat!So? are an antidote to our stick-thin-is-beautiful social mores. But the majority of zines are each a mixture of different writing/art styles, subjects, and approaches in a black-and-white package.

Local LGBT campaigner Jenna Lyles prefers to publish one-off zines rather than numbered series. Her latest is Queer(ing) Activism, reporting on a queer flash mob on the CofC campus right before the Thanksgiving break. Hailing from Greenville, S.C., Lyles first encountered a zine in her freshman year when Piepmeier assigned one for her to read. Three years later she’s a zine veteran, distributing her work by hand or word of mouth.

“People my age and activists feel disempowered, as if we can’t affect what’s going on,” says Lyles, “When you give someone a zine, they have something in their hand, and they’re not so removed from the issue. It makes me feel like I can do something.”

Lyles’ zine is just one of the 20 or so Piepmeier has been given in Charleston alone.

Although the zine heyday is in the past thanks to the internet, these DIY magazines will always have a place in participatory culture. According to Lyles, a zine has to be something you can physically hold. She says, “Digitizing it takes a lot of its power away.”

Piepmeier has heard similar reasoning from other zinemakers, recounting something she had previously heard. “A zine could be shoved in a box and 100 years from now it could be found in an attic,” she says. “It has a longevity that blogs may not have.”

While it’s really intended for scholars, Piepmeier hopes that her book will introduce casual readers to zines as well. The book is short and readable enough for non-academics to follow, and the sheer number and scope of the zines she covers just might encourage readers to start their own.

What do the years ahead hold for the arts?

by Nick Smith December 23, 2009

The future is finally here, if you believe everything you see on the internet.

Face recognition software can scan your photos and pick out individual features. You can build your own Back to the Future-style hoverboard for around $500. Space tourism is finally a reality. Jetpacks and flying cars are pricey (available for six figures), but they exist.

Closer to home, our tourists go to Ft. Sumter, not the firmament. The only face recognition we have is when we spot a buddy as we pass them on King Street. And we’re still just a ways from getting a regular skatepark built downtown, let alone a hover-friendly one. But we still have dreams and ambitions.

This fall we asked some local creative types for their visions of the future. What did they think life would be like in the new decade, or 1,000 years from now?

Most of the answers were soberly focused on each interviewee’s field of expertise. Redux Executive Director Karen Ann Myers described herself as “naively optimistic” about the years ahead. “The definition of how art prices are determined is going to change,” she told me. “People’s perceptions of art and its value will be different.” More fancifully, she wanted to see everyone in a buoyant mood. “I imagine the Earth being a giant trampoline with everybody bouncing everywhere. There would be no cars, traveling would become difficult, but just walking around would be really fun.”

Charleston Center for Photography Owner/Director Stacy Pearsall was more down-to-earth. “The bleeding heart in me wants to see no poverty,” she sighed. “If that answer’s too Miss America for you, I’d also like to see education in art. It would be great to see people being encouraged to be creative. That would be right up there with flying cars.”

Outspoken classical musician Robbi Kenney’s dream is to start a for-profit orchestra in the future. “I could stick around waiting for the right nonprofit structure to develop,” she says, “but I want to do something in my lifetime.” Kenney also wants to see the arts integrated into the for-profit world. She says this would revitalize local organizations, leaving performers free to create. “Artists need to try harder to connect with the audience. Anything that drives the human spirit will attract people.”

So what does the future hold for us? Recently, we’ve seen a consolidation of production and marketing among art groups. Theatre Charleston is an organization set up by several theater groups to jointly promote their shows. Over its four-year existence, its roster has grown from five to nine groups. Charleston Premier Arts is a similar initiative touting the Christmas shows of Charleston Stage, Charleston Ballet Theatre, and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. The Charleston Arts Coalition is helping artists and businesses to connect with seminars and market research.

Instead of chewing off each others’ hind legs for a diminishing piece of sales, artists have joined forces. There seem to be more collaborative shows than ever; most recently Robert Lange and Nathan Durfee at Robert Lange Studios and Laura Gaffke and Tina Hirsig at Plum Elements have combined their talents to create fresh work. There’s no reason why a healthier economy should change that, although some unions will stand the test of time while others drift by the wayside.

But another, less healthy trend is a steady departure of young talent from Charleston, especially in the acting community. In the past year I’ve seen some of the city’s best actors and comedians move to New York, LA, or Chicago because they weren’t getting the support they needed here — or were too busy scrambling to pay their bills to fully utilize their artistic gifts. They and their peers in various disciplines are the future of local arts, and without nurturing such talent, we’ll be stuck in the dark ages for a long time to come.

VISUAL ARTS ‌ Flower Power

by Nick Smith December 21, 2005

Wild Things & Wonder
On view through Jan. 29, 2006
Free
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau St.

Visceral
On view through Jan. 2, 2006
FreeCity Gallery at the Dock Street Theatre, 133 Church St.

Honor Marks may use titles like “Carolina Lily” and “Smooth Coneflower,”‘ but her intricate nature studies aren’t the kind of florals found on Granny’s wallpaper or Aunt Jemima’s summer frocks. Marks seeks something special among the seedlings, finding beauty in the lowliest rock, shrub, or roach.

Venus flytraps emit a lively yellow glow, inviting fireflies in for dinner. Delicate, pale brown loggerhead turtle eggs huddle together in a sandy hollow. A relict trillium with carefully defined shadows on its petals is painted with a care that borders on the clinical, but it still looks fancy. Even a giant palmetto bug looks harmless, eschewing its more revolting qualities. It could almost be another seed or plant — only its fire-flecked colors reflect its creepy crawly capacities.

Marks gives us extreme close-ups of her subjects, finding God in the greenery. An intersected “Crucifix Tomato” shows a perfect medieval cross. A phalaenopsis orchid reveals an ornate figure with wings and tendrils; while UFO abductees would recognize it as an alien, those of a spiritual persuasion will see an angel.

As the recipient of the Coastal Community Foundation’s 2005 Donna and Mike Griffith Lowcountry Artist Award earlier this year, Marks joins runner-up Daryl MacInnes in an invitational exhibit, Wild Things & Wonder, at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. With her work in the show, Marks has focused on endangered species such as the beach morning glory, accompanying it with literary quotes and info bites.

It’s definitely worth taking the elevator, not the stairs, to the gallery’s second floor. When the door opens, a surprising image greets visitors, one that’s very different from the parade of petals below. Daryl MacInnes’ “Place to Start” shows a lantern-bearing skeleton wandering a forest, bones scattered at its feet. The woodland world exists in the orb of a larger skull, and the fleshless trekker introduces a motif that crops up in other examples of the artist’s work.

“Place to Start” was MacInnes’ first painting, completed back in 2001. This show provides a chance to follow his progress as he develops his chosen themes, with anthropomorphized trees a common sight. In “No Rush,” a tree has skeletal aspects including a ribbed trunk. It stands in a crucified pose and a human skeleton lies in front of it, flanked by two gravestones engraved with yogic words: “Abhyasa” (practice) and “Vairagya” (dispassion).

All this may sound a bit over the top, but MacInnes’ work is deft and it’s fun to see him looking for new ways to tackle hoary old plein air subjects. “Field” is more than a traditional landscape, because it’s painted from an interesting perspective, with the yellow-brown field taking up the lower half of the canvas. The artist also has a good grasp of classical techniques; in “Dawn at McLeod,” he uses light, striking colors for Spanish moss, slave cabins, and patches of sun to lead the eye around the picture.

Juxtaposed with the oaks and cadavers are more examples of Marks’ art. Her work evokes a sense that this is a lab, not a jungle, with artifice and technical experimentation taking precedence over natural chaos. Everything’s too neat to be truly wild.

Michael Gibson’s sculpture, “Entangled,” is the most accomplished artwork in his Visceral show at the Dock Street Theatre. The gravity-defying piece has plenty of mysterious interstices, dents and curves to catch the light. It resembles several real-life forms, including a baby in a cradle, a shattered sea shell, an inner ear (mirroring a shape in one of his colored charcoal “Nightscape”) or the jawbone model one sees at the dentist’s.

The different works in Visceral could almost be by different artists, such is the variety of ideas on display. There’s no harm in using a small exhibition like this as a chance to show examples of an artist’s versatility, and Gibson’s resourceful flair is summed up in the vibrant “Lost Tribes.” It features a ghoulish face with cottonmouth stitches on its lips, a drowsy, sad expression, and drooping eye sockets. Daryl MacInnes would approve.