As one meanders through life, with its twists and turns, we come to understand that life is a journey not often planned–sometimes intentional, other times intuitive, and rarely chosen. The work shown here at Concordia St. Paul Gallery by Gregory J Rose, exemplifies a journey of discovery; the attempt to know and un-know oneself. Through a series of highly emotive and sensorial artworks, Rose offers viewers pathways and portals for reflective healing and contemplation of care.
As one enters the gallery, we are faced with Code Switch Experiment, an immersive video projection created specifically for the Concordia Gallery. It’s a brave gesture to offer up such an emotional overture to the audience upon first engagement with the exhibition. This was an intentional curatorial gesture that hoped to draw the viewer into the world of the artist while also experiencing embodied movement of active participation. Visitors will be immersed in the small gallery space, taking in the animated images of Rose’s art and glitchy, active movement in the projection. If desired, they could take another step and scan the QR codes provided and hear a mixed soundtrack looped on Tik Toks, created by the artist with collaborators. These views can sync and be reinvented by the individual to experience in real time in the space or at home, effectively transcending the gallery space as well as your time and experience within it. Code Switch Experiment is in direct defiance of commercialized creative experiences commonly found today. Instead, the intimacy of the spatiality–that is our understanding and experience of space–facilitates a more embodied experience. The installation becomes what the artist calls a digital portal through time, place, and space. “This project aims to explore how geographies influence politics and culture, ultimately determining the way we see, touch, feel, and interact when the familiar and unfamiliar occupy the same space.”
The image contents of Code Switch Experiment have a direct connection to the 2-dimensional collage work shown in the next gallery entitled Street Glyphs Series, 2023. The intimate hang is an intentional visual and spatial juxtaposition of smaller work with that of the highly emotive, large-scale video installation. Here the viewer looks closely; perhaps slowly, moving from one work to another (there are ten), taking in each one. In the small space, most artworks are located in an alcove with a lower ceiling, we see an intensity in the collages. The artist applies multiple and intricate layers of strong gestures, intense marks, black and white with strong color. Materiality becomes a priori in these works, made with layers of acrylic paint, pen, tape, marker, graphite and ink. The two-dimensional works are visually punctured with powerful colors and graphics, strong gestures and sliced with tape, which serves as a metaphor for skin. For the artist, who often walks at night, these artworks represent the tactileness and intensity of his lived experience in a highly visual urban landscape. To me, the artworks feel responsively urgent in the context of Minneapolis as a place and 2023 as a time; and there is a palpable energy to them with layers of memory–both visual and emotional–to the place and detritus of the city.
On the other side of the second gallery, hung on the two-story gallery wall, are five paintings entitled Neo-Khemitian Express Street Hieroglyphs Series, 2023. They are quiet, large-scale works. They seem to map another landscape, perhaps rural. The artist often spends time beyond the city camping and hiking. The paintings are demarcated by gestural movement, bright colors, and an intensity of mark making. The painting series could be read as both literal maps of metaphorical journeys or an internal codex language. Additionally, materiality again becomes important. The artist utilized paint markers on panels, materials that aren’t always considered high art. The use of a paint marker, a common tool of graffiti artists, was intentional. “I love working with materials that you can find in a junk drawer,” explains the artist.
In what is a counterpoint visually and emotionally to the other work in the exhibition–especially the video project, Rose’s Mal de Ojo y Comida is a three-dimensional ceramic and salt installation that is incredibly autobiographical. Rose calls it “a healing space; an altar-like portal–a meditative experience.” Here temporality, memory, and storytelling underscore the installation. For the artist, it is an homage to the artist’s entire family–both blood and chosen. Mal de Ojo y Comida seeks to come to terms with the reality that family is international, complex, and intersectional. The periphery around Rose is one that, he explains, transcends tradition, economics, cultures, and geography, looking to both Latin/ Mexican traditions and the stories and experiences of his Black experience in the world. This iteration was created specifically for the Concordia Gallery. It utilizes the gallery infrastructure, yet spills onto the floor. In this way, the ideas of the installation sculpture bleed out into the world of the viewer. We can smell the lavender infused in the salt. We can touch the roosters, eggs, ceramics–all of which are symbolic personally for Rose. Visitors can run our fingers through the salt (the artist encourages us to do so.) He explains, “With the use of copal, mortar and pestles, copal burners/vessels, I wanted to bring the idea(s) and traditions of both Black and Brown Cultures, traditions, and stories. Let the copal and smells take you to that other worldly and spiritual space, and let me fill your mind and soul with the thought of feeding you as you enter the door and feel at home. Let the eggs transport the ojo–the envy, good and bad, the jealousy, the negativity from your sacred spaces. Let your soul, person, family and friends stay safe, warm and healthy with the love we all seek and hope to share.”
Above Mal de Ojo y Comida sits the artwork entitled Street Academics, 2018, which is mixed media on a reclaimed door. Created in 2018, this work is the earliest in the exhibition. It is, however, a central part of the autobiographical work Mal de Ojo y Comida. Sitting atop the altar, the work includes paint, collage, graphite, and torn pages of the artist’s sketchbooks from undergraduate and graduate schools. The artist explains, “the sketchbooks show all the secrets that we don’t share publicly. Look closely and you may find them. Esthetically the work reflects the notion that we all have layers, fragments, and intersections; we have an existence that is perpendicular to parallel–overlapping(s) to many facets of the universe and how we harness those energies that dictate our place and story in this world.” For the artist, the fragments of the work become a codex, a series of words, languages, and geographies, metaphorically connecting back to ancient times in Africa as well as personal memories.
The curatorial intention is to create a space that embodies the artistic life and journey as well as Rose’s creative intentions. The exhibition highlights the autobiographical nature of Rose’s work but also the artist’s process–an intensive introspective and reflective examination of self and his quintessential open and collaborative nature. The exhibition is intentionally environmental and sensorial. Together the artist, curator, collaborators, and gallery staff, endeavored to create an exhibition with intense sensory experiences, which we hope may provoke different evocations for the viewer. It is perhaps through these beautiful disruptions to our lives and lived experiences that art can provide spaces and portals for full emotive and sensorial embodiment.
Dr Megan Arney Johnston is an independent curator based in the Minneapolis/St Paul area and Belfast, Northern Ireland (UK/IRE). Currently a Professor of Practice at several universities, she has curated more than 350 exhibitions, projects, parallel events, and community engagements. She has written dozens of exhibition catalog essays and academic journal articles and presented on contemporary curatorial practice, socially engaged methods, and radical museology at numerous national and international conferences. Arney Johnston’s research has developed a framework for a curatorial process called ‘Slow Curating.’ As a social practice it portends alternatives to current museology and teaching as well as a framework for change in the curation and mediation of art. Her book Slow Curating: A Handbook for Socially Engaged Curatorial Practices, will be published by Routledge, UK - Heritage and Museum Studies in 2025. For more information, please see slowcurating.com.
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