By Rick de Yampert
In case you missed it, stepping into “Cuerpo-territorio: Reverberations of Belonging,” a recent exhibition at Stetson University’s Hand Art Center, led visitors to come face to face with “Spinal Shakti,” a vibrant, graffiti-littered, Hindu-inspired work by the president of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
That president? She’s Rajni Shankar-Brown, professor and Jessie Ball duPont Endowed Chair of Social Justice Education at Stetson.
That Shankar-Brown, who is esteemed internationally as a social justice scholar, is also an artist is just one of the surprises – some playful, some provocative, some disturbing – of “Cuerpo-territorio” (Spanish for “body territory”) and its companion exhibition at Hand, “A Yellow Rose Project.” The two shows ran from Sept. 7-Oct. 14.
“Cuerpo-territorio,” which featured Stetson faculty and local/regional artists, was the first exhibition curated at Hand by Natália Marques da Silva since she became director of the art center in February. Meanwhile, “Yellow Rose” is a nationally touring show that features works from 100 photographers (visible digitally via the website ayellowroseproject.com).
Photo by Rick de Yampert
Such a prodigious roster of artists and their wide-ranging mediums (video, sound, 3-D works, photography, painting) combine with Silva’s intentionally broad theme of “belonging” to make the tandem exhibits wildly eclectic – and arresting far beyond the standard-issue, our-theme-today-is-palm-trees multi-artist show.
Further into the gallery, visitors were gobsmacked, by the likes of Shankar-Brown’s modernist Hindu goddess, Leah Sandler’s cheeky “Center for Post-Capitalist History” videos (replete with underwater breath-holding techniques by NASCAR race driver Dale Earnhardt!), Justin Quaid Grubb’s mysterious capsules in his futuristic “Prelude to Mars” and “Mars Is for Fags” physical and video installations, and that “Yellow Rose” photo of a female political protestor whose sign warns that a certain part of her anatomy “grabs back” (a certain ex-president should beware).
For “A Yellow Rose Project,” Texas-based photographer Meg Griffiths and New York City photographer Frances Jakubek wanted to commemorate the centennial of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment, which gave women – except women of color, they note – the right to vote in 1920.
So, the duo invited 100 women photographers across the United States to contribute works “in response, reflection, or reaction to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.”
To allow room at the Hand for other artworks, Silva opted to present “Yellow Rose” as a more compact digital installation. The exhibition’s hundreds of photos were projected onto a wall in the Hand’s Gary R. Libby Gallery in a continuously looped – and reshuffled – slideshow, with patrons able to sit in facing, comfy, living room-style chairs (not some sort of Stalin-esque institutional-industrial chairs) to take in the show.
Less than a third of the photos depict overtly political settings and themes, unless one considers, say, Thalassa Raasch’s “Kiki’s Girl All Grown Up,” a high school yearbook-style pic of a furry-faced she-werewolf, to be a political statement – and perhaps it is – about the need for young women to access their inner wild side.
Some of the photos are “just” portraits of women, whether artfully composed studio shots or in the vein of Andy Warhol’s lo-fi Polaroids. Both those subsets are quite striking, and prod viewers to ponder the subjects’ lives within and beyond political arenas.
The mounted text accompanying “Yellow Rose” soberly notes that “the state of Florida did not ratify the 19th Amendment until May 13, 1969.”
For “Cuerpo-territorio: Reverberations of Belonging,” Silva wanted to explore that “body-territory” term which “comes from feminist geographers who have been working with this idea that you cannot divorce this place or that space from the body,” she says. “How your physical being interacts with a space and how that space interacts with you is fundamental to our experiences.
“I always interpret that in terms of belonging. So when I study a place, it’s like ‘Who belongs there and why? What makes us belong or not belong? Who does the exclusion?’ And then the interpretation goes from identity, so we have people working in terms of race, religion, ethnicity and nature, like ‘Do we belong in nature?’ ”
Along with non-arts professor Rajni Shankar-Brown, “Cuerpo-territorio” included works by Stetson Creative Arts professors Justin Quaid Grubb, Nathan Wolek in collaboration with Eve Payor of the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Leah Sandler, Matt Roberts in collaboration with Stetson creative writing professor Terri Witek, adjunct professor Martha Underriner, and 2023 Digital Arts graduates Dylaney Sabino and Dominic Addonizio. The exhibit also features pieces by DeLand High School fine arts teacher Bryan Carson, Broward County artist Sharene Ashley Mullings, and Noelle McCleaf, a faculty member at the Ringling College of Art and Design.
Cosmic coincidence – or is it the power of Shakti? – played a role in “Cuerpo-territorio.” “Rajni came by and said, ‘I’m also an artist,’ ” Silva recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, we have this exhibition’ and she brought in her work.”
Thus cosmic coincidence – or is it the power of Shakti? – played a role in “Cuerpo-territorio.”
In Hinduism, Shakti is the principle of divine female energy, and is often personified as a goddess (the term comes from the Sanskrit word for “power” or “energy”). And so Shankar-Brown’s “Spinal Shakti,” reflecting her Indian roots and sprinkled with such catch-phrases as “Manifest,” “Persist,” “Resist,” the Hindu mantra “Om Shanti Om,” “Ancestors sing through my flesh” and many others, serves as the patron goddess of the nearby “A Yellow Rose Project.”
Meanwhile, the nine 18-inch capsules of Grubb’s “Prelude to Mars” installation were displayed physically as well as digitally on three wall-mounted screens, where the capsules magically, repeatedly reconfigured themselves in sync via stop-motion. Watching them hopscotch – now they’re here, suddenly they’re there, now there are nine, suddenly now six – one was ensnared by a childlike playfulness.
And yet, as the installation’s robotic, female android voice murmured seductively, the experience became faintly disquieting, as if a higher intelligence was attempting to communicate some arcane message to us lesser beings. The extraterrestrials of the Steven Spielberg film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” use the mathematics of musical scales to communicate to humans – Grubb’s capsules used the geometry of space, leaving viewers to reflect on how the shifting capsules relate to the “queer futuring” Grubb explores in his artist statement.
There were more – many more – worthy works in “Cuerpo-territorio.” Martha Underriner’s Zen-like, 3-D, geometrical piece from her “Never Done” series managed to be minimalist and expansive at the same time. Nathan Wolek and Eve Payor collaborated to create the one-hour and 15-minute video “Sunrise at Canaveral National Seashore” –with binaural sounds recorded that day of Dec. 1, 2020.
Videographer-photographer Matt Roberts joined with poet Terri Witek for “Walking the Wrack Line,” which combines text with video and photos from their 24-mile walk along the Canaveral National Seashore to create a multimedia work.
“Philosophically, the wrack line reads like a long, connected treatise on both beauty and danger,” the pair say in their artist statement. That was borne out by a disconcerting table-top tableau of hand-written, seemingly random bon mots and black-and-white photos depicting both human and nature’s detritus – a toothbrush, shells, dead birds – left on the beach.
It was another Shankar-Brown painting, “Sangha,” that encapsulated the many moods evoked – and provoked – by the exhibition’s “belonging” theme. The expressionist work is a close-up view of a metallic gray face, with wide, staring eyes and the Hindu red-dot bindi on her forehead. But her expression is difficult to read: Forlorn? Contemplative? Distressed? Resigned?
“Sangha,” the painting’s title, is Sanskrit for “community” or “company.” But one was left wondering whether the subject feels included or excluded by her community. “Cuerpo-territorio: Reverberations of Belonging” may have left viewers pondering such a dichotomy, not only within these artworks’ subjects but also within themselves.
– Rick de Yampert is a freelance writer and musician who lives in Palm Coast. Previously he was the arts and entertainment writer for The Daytona Beach News-Journal for 23 years.
