(MAY 7 - JUNE 13, 2015)
Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens make sculpture unlike anyone else in the world of art, trained or untrained. They are untrained. Their work seems steeped in ancient European history, especially from the marginalized viewpoints of mysterious hermits, heretic witches and pilgrims of no obvious religion, with a touch of organic Star Wars thrown in. Much of this has to do with their taking in the lore of the isolated part of volcanic France they chose to live after fleeing the urban madness of Paris.
In their sparsely populated village is an old church dedicated to the Black Virgin, whose roots go back to ancient Portugal. Although the statue of the Virgin is now ensconced in a French museum, the 12th Century church, once a destination point for pilgrims, is still there. The landscape has absorbed the mystery and vitality of those earlier days, as the Staelens have absorbed the landscape into their process, making tough and poetic sculpture from materials they gather and recycle.
Their sculptures come from the forest. They do not tell us who or what they are, they do not give away any information other than what is told by the pieces themselves; by the hooded garments they wear, the spears they carry and the composure of their bodies, and the basic materials—exposed lava, metal, stones, wires and textiles--in surprising variety and complexity. Some of them are mounted, half horse, half-human.
The sculptures appear as beings that have made their homes in a real forest, in a cultural dance between dimensions, they will decide if you can enter; if they choose you, they will protect you forever. Though medieval at first glance, they are very much in the present. Nothing ever looked like them. They own whatever space they guard. They protect integrity.
For further information, please contact: 212-226-3768, or info@cavinmorris.com.
JOHN MICHAEL KOHLER ARTS CENTER
608 New York Avenue
Sheboygan, WI 53081
P 920.458.6144 F 920.458.4473
The works of both Sandra Sheehy (UK) and Anna Zemánková (1908–1986) draw inspiration from plant life and garden scenes. Sheehy makes felted wall pieces as well as delicate sculptures reminiscent of cocoons from chicken wire, fabric, and paper, which she later encrusts with fabric, stitching, beads, sequins, and shells. Anna Zemánková’s embroideries on paper suggest botanical illustrations and reveal nature’s more mystical side. Both artists, with some measure of spontaneity, allow the imagery of the outdoor world to unfold before the viewer. Shown together, their works disclose intangible, and spiritual aspects of the plant world.
VODUN, VODOU, CONJURE: THE ANIMISTIC ARTS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
(MARCH 26 - MAY 2, 2015)
Cavin-Morris Gallery is honored to present an exhibition of magic and spirit expressed in intense and powerful works of art from Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. Stereotypical language falls apart when speaking about this kind of magic. The end product of the piece is less important than the means by which it was made. It is all about process and intention. It is an animistic magic that relies on Nature for its material and spiritual sources - for healing, for love, for midwifery, for remembrance, for power, for cultural resistance, and ultimately for finding a balance in human nature.
Conjure and Vodou’s earliest manifestations were in the Old World (Africa), but when the slaves were forced here from West Africa and the Kongo area, it was remembered and reinvented (creolized) in an American form. Always covert, Vodun is more in the open now. It is not the court art we associate with the major empires of Benin, it is the vernacular art of common people struggling to survive in a contemporary world.
Part of the exhibition includes a large selection of magic and spirit objects from the Jean-Jacques Mandel Collection, and other collections that have not been seen in this country before. This work is from Togo, Benin, and Tanzania. Often covered with a thick sacrificial patina and charged with metal and the binding powers of ropes, these pieces from the early to mid-Twentieth Century demonstrate that Vodun is still alive, highly functioning, and changing in the contemporary Pan-African world.
The ancestors of these Pan-diasporic peoples provided the ethos and spiritual influences for the black people of Haiti, Jamaica and the United States. The pieces from Jamaica include art by the Athertons, father and son, Everald Brown, and Errol McKenzie and were made to use in spiritual ceremonies, or as amulets of protection. We will be showing some very early and rare ironwork from Haiti including an iron staff of Dambala made for a Vodou temple, and a Masonic sword. Many practitioners who took Legba, the lwa (loa) of the crossroads as a spirit guide were also Masons. We will also show some temple flags of sequined cloth. From the United States we will honor the work that extends from the Southern Black Belt yard show or conjure complex with pieces by Bessie Harvey, Kevin Sampson, important works not shown before by Georgia artist J.B. Murray, and sculpture by Osker Gilchrist who used bleached white animal bones on his property in compositions to ward off evil spirits.
There will be an accompanying on-line catalog to explain the connections between these works in the African and African American religious experience as modes of resistance and transcendence.
Click here to read about our upcoming Vodou exhibition (March 26th - May 2, 2015)
http://disinfo.com/2015/03/vodou-powerful-works-art/
Cavin-Morris is pleased to present an exhibition celebrating and reflecting upon its 30th anniversary as a gallery. We have traveled many non-mainstream roads in those 30 years, some hard, some easier, all of them unpredictable, and all of them filled with some of the greatest art, friendships, mysteries, and adventures we could ever ask for.
We’ve eschewed a nostalgic review and chosen to gather an abstracted impression of those years, an attempt to show in these works of international self taught artists, arts of the ethnosphere, ceramics and textiles, the inspirations that still excite us about having an eclectic gallery in New York in these decidedly interesting times.
We will feature work from artists who have been with us from the beginning such as the intricate slave boats of Kevin Sampson, to the dangerous and exquisite drawings of Anna Zemánková. Newer discoveries in recent years include the visionary drawings of Angkasapura from Java and Solange Knopf of Belgium, the haunting amuletic sculptures of Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staelens, and the anarchitectural towers of Sylvain Corentin. We will exhibit works from the estates of J.B. Murray and Melvin Edward Nelson. We will show art brut from Japan, as well as contemporary ceramics from Western and non-Western sculptors. We will show masks from all over the world.
We exhibit a wide range of art. In an attempt to find underlying connective themes we use words such as timelessness, a respect for the materials used linking to a respect of nature, and the drive in all the creators to go beyond surface beauty in search of artistic expression. These ideas will be the binding themes of the exhibition. This exhibition is a tribute to those artists whose integrities have always given us the courage to push forward. This exhibition is also a thank-you to those scholars, critics, curators, and collectors who have inspired us, and whose support has made our continuation possible.
For further information, please contact: 212-226-3768, or info@cavinmorris.com.
Incredible and rare footage of J.B. Murray from circa 1986 via Judith McWillie.
John Bunion (J. B.) Murray (1908-1988) was a farmer who lived in rural Glascock County, Georgia, near the community of Mitchel. When he was approximately seventy years of age, believing he had experienced a vision from God, he began writing a non discursive script on adding machine tape, wall board, and stationery.
J.B. Murray, Untitled, c. 1978-1988, Marker, ink on paper, 14 x 10.5 inches, JBM 398
The Design Observer
Author: John Foster
Sylvain Corentin is a self-taught artist living in the South of France. A former architect, he is constantly imagining and building fantastical constructions, which he fondly refers to as “Anarchitectures.” In his own words, his sculptures “build a bridge between the image of a utopian past and the reality of our future, to erase the contradictions that exist between these two concepts, with hopes that we find beauty in seeing the world as it exists now, without projections.” (Read more...)
Author: Edward M. Gomez
It is no secret that many works of art can be characterized by a powerful therapeutic aspect, which functions as much for the people who create them as it does for those who view them. Even photographic reproductions of pre-historic, cave-wall paintings can pack a potent, psychic-emotional punch.
For the Belgian self-taught artist Solange Knopf, making art has been a soul-soothing, inexplicably rewarding activity. As she plainly states, producing her art has given her a fulfilling sense of personal identity, something she sorely lacked until well into adulthood.
Humble in the face of the mysterious nature of artistic, creative energy – her own or that of any other art-maker – Knopf says she is awed by the thought of where it comes from and how, through her own efforts, it is released. A little bit world-weary and admittedly somewhat timid or cautious by nature, Knopf is a contemporary woman who has experienced some of modern life’s typical but still daunting tribulations – and emerged stronger and more self-aware as a result of those unsettling episodes.
Image: Behind the Darkness No. 1, 2013, mixed media on paper, 28.74 x 31.1 ins., 73 x 79 cm
Purchase to view the entire article:
THROUGH FEBRUARY 14TH, 2015
"Beyond this is a vivid range of work by self-taught artists from around the world, more plentiful than in prior years. One of the most amazing displays is of seven Czech artists at Cavin-Morris. They work mostly on paper, drawing abstract, mystical and botanically inspired designs. (Art by one of them, Anna Zemánková, was in the 2013 Venice Biennale.)" - Click to read the full article
Click here to read article.
Enigmas Rapt in Mysteries: American Art Without Epoch
December 18, 2014 – February 7, 2015
Timeless is a key word for the great art in this field. It is powerful and relevant no matter when it is seen. It is not tied in any way to the faddism of mainstream art movements. Any work by any artist in this exhibition might have been called Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet back in the day. But in fact there was almost no American material in the original Art Brut collection. The reasons are very simple. At the time Dubuffet was putting together his magnificent collection the work from the Americas was little known. In fact, the only documented exposure really to African-American works were six paintings by the Haitian master Hector Hyppolite, which Andre Breton brought back to Paris and gave to the Compagnie L’Art Brut. He took the paintings back when the collection came to the United States. The field is an organic entity, always changing. As attention began to be paid to idiosyncratic artists who were shapeshifters within their own cultures, or who came from non-European backgrounds and were forced to live in two realities, two cultures simultaneously, Dubuffet’s original concept became locked in time.
The artists in this exhibition were not known to the architects of the Art Brut temple. The word ‘outsider’ has indeed haunted them but it has rendered itself impotent by its inclusion of anything people consider eccentric. We have chosen to curate this exhibition with certain criteria in mind. The criteria are: The artists are self-taught. Not one of them makes work for a mainstream agenda. For all, the process of making the work is of equal or greater importance than the finished piece. None intentionally made work for the art market. Each of them made work to define their own senses of Place, or healing, or spiritual accounting, or self-definition. Even if the work speaks in the language of a culture, we chose those whose forms are little or not at all limited by formal tradition. They are all very American and very iconoclastic.
Although we see African-American work now in the Art Brut Museum in Lausanne and in important Art Brut-oriented collections, African-American art really represents a sort of wild border to the canon decreed by Dubuffet. When push comes to shove, no art in the world can be made outside human culture so we have to go with the assumption that it is only work made outside the Art Mainstream Culture that applies. Even flint-knapping holds the baggage of hunting gathering society. We can never know what Dubuffet really might have felt about the work from the Americas. Surely the African-American inclusion would have made for an amazing discourse. Take, for example, the work of JB Murray, which he originally made as a way of communicating to his community about being spiritually saved or lost, and which was so extreme to some that he was banished from his church, and regarded with suspicion as to his mental state. Later he was welcomed back and even allowed to do some preaching when it was seen that his vision was sincere and his state of spiritual intensity was deemed truly coming from above. So the culture changed and absorbed his iconoclastic intensity.
This work continues to pick up mojo despite the failure to lock it into any consistent definition. It does not fit mainstream criteria. It has no agenda. It has power in its mysteries. And it is not stuck in time. Its forms and intentions are fluid and ever changing.
Artists included are: Chelo González Amezcua, Emery Blagdon, Peter Charlie Besharo, Ras Dizzy, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Guyodo, Errol McKenzie, J.B. Murray, Melvin Edward Nelson, Norma Oliver, Philadelphia Wireman, Martín Ramírez, Anthony Joseph Salvatore, Jon Serl, Gregory Van Maanen, Helen Butler Wells, Joseph Yoakum, and others.
For further information please contact: Shari Cavin, Caroline Casey, or Marissa Levien at 212-226 3768, or info@cavinmorris.com.
