By Arin Guyette
Valdosta State University’s Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery has recently brought in a new show: Mixed Bag: An Assortment of Contemporary Craft. This exhibition is composed of five artists (Max Adrian, Emily Culver, Elyse-Krista Mische, M. Paide Ward, and Xia Zhang) who bring together different perspectives of contemporary art from across the country. Artists today often explore the concepts of sexuality, gender, religion, race, and death and this exhibition brings those challenges to the public of Valdosta, Georgia.
After walking in through the front, you’ll find the gallery to your left behind two glass doors. The overall space is small, and if you’re not paying attention, you may just bump into Mische’s piece The Great Divide. A white, pyramid-like shape with human silhouettes across from one another. One laying down and the other rising upwards, likely calling back to religion- specifically Christianity (as there is a cross at the top of the piece).
Zhang’s work Thoroughness in Your Seediness is in a dark corner with the identification card moved to a completely different spot. It’s a bit disorienting. Thoroughness in Your Seediness is a video of someone cutting up a pomegranate and sewing the pieces back together. The crunch of the knife against the fruit is a little unsettling and the lack of any outside noise makes it border on ASMR (or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Though most ASMR videos are meant to relax the viewer, certain sounds may trigger an unpleasant chill or irritation of the ears. I’m not sure what to make of this work, however, I feel a deeper meaning present by the choice of medium. I found myself asking a friend what they made of it and they said, “Maybe it’s about control and reconstruction”. The fact this person chooses to cut up the fruit but sews it back together in their own way can symbolize the willful destruction of something to bring it back more personalized than before. In relation to Zhang’s statements about race and genders in their art, I can’t say that this piece’s message is clear.
Contrasting with Thoroughness in Your Seediness, along the first wall to the left is Zhang’s Madame X. The set of 8 frames is evenly spaced and well lit. The small subtitles for each image insist that you get up close and move with the piece. Zhang’s focus here is on race and gender, which becomes evident through the text. The fourth image (from left to right) shows a man grabbing a woman by her arm and saying, “You come to my room, then there won’t be any trouble.” In five, six, and seven we notice the Chinese women using bad English, which contrasts with all the men’s lines and enforces the foreign dialect. Created with porcelain, cotton, gold thread, wood, wire, and glaze, each image appears as a sleek, yellow box that juts out from the wall. Each box is somewhat crooked with dents and bends as if it was crafted quickly or half-hearted. However, the glaze on each frame shows Zhang’s solidified dedication to their shape. The subtitles are emphasized with the gold thread while the images appear printed on standard copy paper.
Most of the work off the wall belongs to Ward and their How Firm a Foundation series. Created from cast concrete, cedar, found wood, and copper nails, Ward plays with the word “firm” by casting the pillows with concrete. Nestled above each of the concrete casts are curved wood panels, lined with thin strips of wood and held together by the copper nails. Ward creates the illusion of the wood’s weight through the realistic curvature and bends in her cast pillows. With each piece, the size of the pillow, height, and type of the wood change, but everything else remains the same. The concrete pillows represent Ward’s longing for stability and the curved wood may very well represent the artist or the audience of the world she wishes to stabilize.
Within the space, there are several pedestals positioned around the room and a large tiled artwork on the floor in the far back (Culver’s What She Saw When She Walked In). This setup is a common approach to so the overall feel is lacking and a little creepy. Overall, this show is meant to evoke thought and spur conversation. It is some of the newest works out there so that speaks to the appeal. However, the current setup of the pieces with the odd placement and lackluster lighting choices somewhat detracts from that power.
Bio: Arin is a junior Bachelor of Arts major who is studying animation and graphics design at Valdosta State University. They are scheduled to graduate in 2020 and wish to work with television, movies, and gaming.
