Published: Mar 05, 2008 06:31 AM
Modified: Mar 05, 2008 06:31 AM
Sugar and spice and animationBy Deborah R. Meyer
The medium is a part of the message in an exhibit at Stone Center
Agatha Barton III is visiting the UNC campus, and she is someone that everyone should meet.
She is made of sugar on sheetrock, a portrait by Andrea Chung. The piece is on display as part of "PepperPot," the exhibit at the Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on the UNC campus.
Curator Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, a 2004 graduate of UNC, volunteered with the Stone Center as an undergraduate and savored the experience. While getting her master of fine arts degreed at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Sunstrum was invited to curate a show for the gallery.
"I knew that the gallery tended to show more familiar works of art and not much contemporary work and not young artists, so that was my agenda going in," Sunstrum said.
"I wanted to challenge the visitors and showcase the younger artists."
She invited Chung and Cosmo Whyte, fellow students at MICA; Lauren Kelley, who she met at an artist residency in Maine; and Morolake Odeleye, recommended to her by friends.
"I didn't know her work but I had her send me images, and it was a perfect fit, Sunstrum said. "I wanted four and that was the magic four."
Sunstrum met with the artists, except for Odeleye, who is based in Houston.
"It is important to meet the artists in their space and talk to them, to get a sense of what they are about," Sunstrum said. "You can learn more."
In addition to being young and experimental, these artists were chosen for their emphasis on their medium having a special meaning in their work. The subtitle for the show is "Multi-Media Installation, Meaning, and the Medium in Contemporary Africa Diasporic Art." The artists in the show work in media including photography and video as well as unusual substances including cinnamon and sugar.
Agatha's portrait is hanging in my head. It is an impressive piece regardless of its medium, but I was intrigued with the use of sugar as a medium. I caught up with Chung on the phone, and she explained that she was drawn to use sugar after delving into the history of her homeland, Jamaica. Cheap labor was brought to the island from Africa, India, and China, where her grandfather came from, to mine raw goods, including sugar cane. This history, combined with the diabetes that plagued Chung's grandmother, Agatha, steered Chung to begin to explore sugar's potential.
"I let the sugar do what it does," Chung said. "There's no predicting what is going to happen. It has its own life. I can't control it. I can't keep it from dripping."
She adds paste to vary the sugar's thickness. The dripping that occurs in the portrait just adds to its magnificence and its mysterious aura.
I wondered about the sugar on the floor at the sheetrock's base. It seemed as if Agatha had dripped down the canvas. And these streaks -- were they tears or was she melting away?
"It was something that Pamela and I thought about doing," Chung said. "It was a site-specific thing that happened. The piece looks like a headstone you might see in a cemetery and the sugar kind of looks like dirt."
The other pieces in the show are provocative, using animation, photography, and -- in the case of Odeleye's installation -- mannequin hands, patent leather, and cast resin.
For Whyte's installation, the gallery installed a new sound system and projectors that can be rotated 360 degrees. His piece grew out of the unexpected death of his father. The work includes the image of a body in a funereal pose, wrapped in cloth and tied with a string in front of a screen showing animated drawings. Even my daughter Beckett, who is just shy of 3, recognized the solemnity of the piece; upon rounding the corner and seeing the body, Beckett promptly sat down to ponder it. We stared together.
Kelley's eight-minute and eleven-second stop motion animation uses Barbie dolls to let us peep and eavesdrop into the lives of her black women, and the three photographs she has in the exhibit had my jaw dropping. If you get a chance, check out her "Pick Wig." Look closely.
Sunstrum has done an extraordinary job. I asked her what surprised her on this curatorial journey.
"When it was all installed and I could take a moment and look at it -- and I didn't plan for this as a curator, and I wish I could say I did -- I found there is this amazing breadth of emotional responses that happens when someone experiences the show," said Sunstrum.
She said that at the reception people were laughing out loud at Kelley's video but were subdued by Whyte's piece.
"There is this kind of roller coaster of emotions that I was surprised by when I saw it all together," Sunstrum said.
The show runs through May 11.
Reach Deborah Meyer at 942-3252 or eloise@nando.com
2008 The Chapel Hill News
