This time, even if I waited until the last week (the show will close on October 28, 2012) it's Vanessa German and Charlee Brodsky's time. It is very nice to see two female talents under the same roof, with ways of expressing themselves (and themes) so different. In the whole, after watching both the presentations, you feel a sense of completeness. Each artist presents a 50% of Life. Together they are the whole.
Vanessa German is the energetic energetic vitality of life. She is the Community, she is the History of America, she is the Memory of her brothers and sisters, of the past and of the present days. Her exhibition 21st Century JuJu is a magic of individual and universal memories (of the Afro American community, mainly).
Her pieces, created from blending old objects together -sometimes with modern ones- are simply astonishing . You feel the History, but in front of each character or "doll" you cannot avoid to think about our society today.
The composition of each piece is very dense of meaning and messages. But nothing is left to chance. You can tell that because the colors are perfect, the volumes are balanced... It is exactly like reading a poem, and Vanessa is also a poet, eventually.
You cannot avoid or escape from this atavistic power, also because she directly involves you. This is evident in my favorite pieces: "dolls" with little mirrors that suddenly capture your image. So you are in the game, you cannot avoid it, because she is talking exactly with you, no one else. It's you that created the problem, it's you that have to face it, it's you that can be part of the solution. This is what she seems to tell.
I'm talking of problems, you see, because the masterpieces that I called "dolls" are pretty serious about that. Their components are not only knick-knacks found at the flea market. They are verses of the complex poem she is saying. And it is a poem of a community that suffered a lot, and still does.
More than dolls, these are totems or, as I could recollect from my personal experience, even kind of holy statues of a laic religion.
Charlee's exhibition Good Dog on the upper floor, is completely different and I had the pleasure to discover it little by little, as I was walking through the rooms. While Vanessa is the body, you could say Charlee is the mind. Vanessa's work is tridimensional (sculpture) and Charlee's is bi-dimensional (photography).
Charlee Brodsky is a professor of photography at CMU and her pictures are a great lesson of photography, indeed. So balanced in terms of lines, highlight, accents or shadows... Each picture is accompanied by a sentence or a writing. You could easily forecast them just by looking at the picture, so much appropriate they are.
But the most important part of her work, even if I don't want anyone to put a label on this, is that in each picture you can see her dog Max. But she's not a dog photographer. This ain't funny, as you could think. The sentences are deep and the presence of the cute dog is always intense and dramatic, in a way. She knows, that what you feel. She knows about art, composition, photography, colors, literature, poetry, books, people... And she knows the city and the urban environment. Her work is a reflection upon life and urban realities that allows life (and certain situations) to show up.
Charlee is able to get strict to the point with a "simple" click, but then has the knowledge to match them with books that can exactly explain what is she feeling (or he is, coz here everything passes through Max).
Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Beckett... These are the most emphasized quotations (I love this one of Beckett...).
The exhibit is a lot about Nature and the City, I would say. It is very powerful also this work, even if different from Vanessa's one. Together, the two presentations are exactly what you need to give meaning to your days. One should "take" both every once in a while. Just like a good medicine: a vaccine against superficiality.
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