Arlobi press jefferson pinder revival and academy 2013, reviewed these two small, brainy shows rever

Arts & Entertainment : Gallery (museums)

“Jefferson Pinder: Revival” At G Fine Art to Aug. 3

“Academy 2013”

At Connersmith to Aug. 24

These two small, brainy shows reverberate beyond their galleries' walls.

By Kriston Capps • July 19, 2013

Jefferson Pinder’s “Revival” is somebody’s nightmare. The most harrowing images in this multichannel video installation open in a parking garage. At the far end of the row lurks a menacing figure. The camera creeps forward toward him, its focus

Jefferson Pinder, “Revival”

occasionally falling out of sync with the man—an effect that may heighten the viewer’s fear. The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” plays, and as the heavy-metal storm gathers force, it becomes clear that the man, who is black, knows every word.

This is the last place where some people might want to find themselves: caught, alone, in a poorly lit place, with an apparently angry black man. It’s the kind of fantasy terror that could have motivated George Zimmerman to stand his ground, if you will, against the hoodie-wearing, snack-packing Trayvon Martin, whose youth and race seem to have marked him as a threat in the man’s mind. But this may be the last place where Chukwumaa, the mononymous artist who stars in Pinder’s “Helter Skelter” video, wants to find himself, too. The idea that white people might perceive them as threatening at any time or place is a special nightmare that black men live daily.

Pinder’s “Revival” videos are portraits that examine the juxtaposition between socially constructed ideas of being black or white and the psychic reality of being black. The exhibition is a sequel to “Juke,” a series that Pinder showed at G Fine Art in 2006.

“Revival” uses the same formula as “Juke”: videos of black people lip-synching to songs that code white. This time, Pinder employs five screens to show several singers at once, with music projected in the gallery (instead of the single-channel videos with headphones he used for “Juke”). The installation, designed by Pablo Van Winkle, is ready for a museum; “Revival” should be put in one.

The “Helter Skelter” portrait of Chukwumaa wouldn’t work nearly so well if it weren’t on view with a five-channel portrait of a group (Michael E. Harris, Kekeli Sumah, Dominick Reibrun, Orlando Pinder, and Ayodamola Okunseinde) lip-synching to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Reibrun is the focal point: His face strains to evoke

every miserable note in Freddie Mercury’s lamentful opera. Reibrun reportedly works in IT in Chicago (where Pinder, who previously worked in D.C., now resides), but viewers will be forgiven for mistaking him for a trained actor. Where the heroes of the 1992 flick Wayne’s World famously headbanged along to the explosive allegro movement of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Pinder’s chorus instead merely stares forward— all except Reibrun, who gives it his everything. These are portraits, not karaoke music videos, and their effect is alternatingly stark, comic, and deeply sad.

The juxtaposition is not always funny. April Yvonne Garrett and Amy Sherald give nothing away with their rendition of the Indigo Girls’ “Prince of Darkness,” so the viewer is left with only the prickly effect of watching two black women—singing with the voices of white women—lyrics such as, “My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.” Pinder controls every factor of his subjects’ portraits: With the exception of the dramatic setting of the “Helter Skelter” video, all the other portraits feature soft nighttime cityscapes as backdrops. Pinder’s subjects mostly evoke a stone-faced resoluteness. It’s unclear in the case of Garrett and Sherald what their affect signifies.

Perhaps they possess a deep connection with the Indigo Girls’ music; perhaps they’re resisting a song they dislike, or don’t know.

One major difference between today and 2006, when Pinder first showed a video series like this: The range of music that codes as black in popular culture has expanded. Seeing Pinder and company sing along to Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” does not seem so unlikely—is that the word for it?—given the nowpopularity of black musicians who toy with so-called authentic blackness, from Lil B to Frank Ocean. The most hyped album of 2013, Kanye West’s Yeezus, sounds like a Nine Inch Nails record from the 1990s more than the work of a mainstream black artist circa 2006. Today, it feels less like a gag than it might have in 2006 to see artist Wilmer Wilson IV taking the lead on Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches.”

“Revival” is especially resonant now that the country is struggling to reconcile the death of Trayvon Martin with the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Pinder’s work has no direct bearing on the former’s death or the latter’s trial. But his videos explore how we are conditioned to see color by what we see in culture. It escapes (many of) us how Zimmerman saw helter-skelter in an unarmed teenage boy. “Revival” makes it the viewer’s job to parse out how popular culture can construct our understanding of what it means to be and act black.

Ayodamola Okunseinde gives the most inscrutable performance of all as he lip-synchs to The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” a song whose upbeat music belies its morbid lyrics. Pinder challenges the viewer to hear those lyrics come out of Okunseinde’s mouth and not hear something else in it. Morrissey and Okunseinde, singing the same words to the same tune, are not singing the same song. I’ll never think about “Girlfriend in a Coma” the same way again.

“Academy 2013” At Connersmith to Aug. 24

The lion’s share of noteworthy artists in “Academy 2013”—the annual invitational survey of work by area art students—hails from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Even as the school is taking a life raft from the University of Maryland, the Corcoran is proving its value to the region. Six of the 20 artists in the show graduated with bachelor’s degrees from the college this year (and another graduated with a BFA in

2004). As ever, “Academy” is a mixed bag, but this year’s offerings are marked by strong personalities.

It’s not often that a commercial-gallery show of mostly untested artists features so much performance. Four of the artists in the show—recent Corcoran alums Armando López Bircann, Annie Hanson, and Rachel Hrbek as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Mihaela Savu—contribute performance works. Hrbek’s “Easy Consumption” comprises the video documentation of a piece she previously performed at the Corcoran for its 2013 “Next” exhibition of student work. Lopez Bircann,

Armando López Bircann, “Refraction 2” (2012)

Hanson, and Savu, on the other hand, performed their works live at the Connersmith opening.

López Bircann’s “Refraction 2” is an “Academy” standout, a fashion-sculpture installation of sorts. For his performance, the artist models a plastic sculptural carapace that falls somewhere between the architecture of Zaha Hadid, the fashion of Viktor & Rolf, and the ACME flying suits of Wile E. Coyote. A perfect peacock, López Bircann tugs on various strings to bring his dress from its rest state to full bloom, at which point he appears to be encased in a plastic star or a spiky echinoderm.

Hanson’s performance—in which she bakes bread batter on site and stuffs dough under towels, on which she then lays her head—is totally affectless The same could be said of Mihaela Savu’s piece: She mumbles from a text while wearing a sculptural dress covered in aluminum, shell-shaped medallions. There’s not a great deal of emotional satisfaction to be found in “Academy 2013.” Much of the work comes across as academic, but that may be unsurprising.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with taking the academic route, either. Jay Hendrick’s studiously casual paintings fit a vital trend in abstract painting today, a geometric unseriousness worthy of such rising painters as Amy Feldman or Patrick Brennan. The sculpture in “Academy 2013” hits the mark, too: Steven Skowron’s “Bound Desire” piece, a steel-wire cube bound and bowed by a knotted rope, is the funniest work in the show. I liked Jeremiah Holland’s wood sculptures at the Corcoran “Next” show, and I like his black-walnut and poplar “Wall Table #2” here for not quite being a piece of useful furniture. Wood is a trend in this show: University of Maryland MFA Pat McGowan contributes two handsome towering, winding wood sculptures.

It would be a mistake to read too much into the concerns of D.C. area art-school graduates from the small sample that “Academy” provides. But it is easy to tell that series founder and curator (and Connersmith partner) Jamie Smith favors smart work. A suite of portraits from Kyle Hackett, Vincent Hui, and Jason Edward Tucker could be a mini-exhibit on high-minded portraiture in D.C. If the sample in “Academy

2013” is at all representative, then the area’s art students are grappling with all the right questions.

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OUR READERS SAY

1 iceman July 18, 2013

thought the pinder review was a bit fatuous. Black people singing "white" music..really? that's deep insight? all the "talking (singing) heads are angry looking post collegiate types..easy exploitation and a reach to find a deep meaning here

2 Annie July 18, 2013

More photos of a 4 hour performance :) https://www.facebook.com/media/set/? set=a.523470944358777.1073741826.161359250569950&type=3

3 Coltrane July 20, 2013

Iceman, you missed the point with Pinder's show. I don't think you saw it. What do you mean by 'post collegiate types'? What's the other 'type' you'd rather see?

4 iceman July 23, 2013

I saw the show. The "point"..the "Other" you mistook for a threat is a coopted ( with reservation ) "normal" just like you? All the portraits were of performance artist, post-collegiate intellectuals..not the average DC resident on Georgia Ave..AS IF these people don't willingly chill out at Saint-ex and Marvin's..oh a black man singing the Rolling Stones..THE SCANDAL..that's deep..we KNOW black people can't appropriate the music of other culture's like EVERY other ethnic group does. Is there any deep meaning in a white kid listening to and singing salsa or rap? An asian rocking to Jay-Z and Public Enemy?

5 iceman July 23, 2013

It LOOKS good btw and SOUNDS good, but I think the "meaning" being read into it is pretentious

6 Kriston Capps July 24, 2013

"the 'Other' you mistook for a threat is a co-opted ( with reservation ) 'normal' just like you?"

Hi iceman: I am not personally mistaking him for a threat. Just physically speaking, I'm in a room watching a video, not in a parking garage with anyone. But the camera has a perspective, and I'm describing that camera perspective—and what I think Jefferson Pinder wants us to know about that camera perspective.

Pinder is describing racist anxiety with this video: the use of "Helter Skelter" brings up Charles Manson, who used that phrase as the name for his violent race war fantasy). It's not a guy in a garage singing Sgt. Pepper's. And the camerawork plus that song *does* give the room an unsettling vibe. I think that's the camera perspective that Pinder is trying to evoke: Someone who feels this way, totally unsettled, totally Helter Skelter–ed, any time he sees a black man in a dark place.

And that does happen! I can't speak to it from personal experience (I am white) but I totally understand that it does. Right when I wrote this story, Questlove wrote a Facebook post about (well, about a lot of things, but in part about) how he hates being in parking garages. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/questlove-trayvonmartin-and-i-aint-shit.html

Which is just crazy, and so sad, and basically common.

So, to my mind, everything in Pinder's video *points* to an interpretation of the camera perspective as a perspective rooted in irrational, racist fear. What I hope I wrote in that review is not an interpretation of the man (played by Chukwumaa) at the end of the parking garage. Again, I'm not in the garage with this figure, I'm in the gallery seeing through a lens. I'm concerned with, and I think Pinder is concerned with, that lens.

7 iceman July 24, 2013

Well don't want to parse this too much. If that's what you see, who am I to complain. Seems like an emperor's new clothes thing here. Black performance artist singing white classic rock as deep statement on race issues in America..oh well.

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