Charlotte Street Fellows 2023
[30 de outubro de 2023]
When we look at the research of Ruben Castillo, Sean Nash, and Sun Young Park, the three artists who were awarded the Charlotte Street Fellowship in 2023, there are, interestingly, several points of contact.
An element that stands out almost immediately is the three artists' relationship with craftsmanship. Whether through ceramics (Sun Young Park), the use of paper and traditional engraving techniques (Ruben Castillo), or conversation with collage and painting (Sean Nash), the three of them have research that is mainly based on doing things with their hands. Another element that draws attention is how these artists approach the notion of the body. Sean Nash is interested in the foods that make up our nutrition and can become elements in his paintings, while Sun Young Park, using clay, will create strange ceramic figures that appear somewhere between the monstrous, the absurd, and abstraction. Finally, Ruben Castillo is particularly interested in how archival fragments can echo a more ghostly and shattered physical presence.
In a historical present that still responds to the recent social isolation and excessive virtual communication caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, these common interests do not deserve to go unnoticed. If, concerning the form and results of their research, this exhibition may suggest similarities, it is also essential to understand how these three artists' research methods differ.
Ruben Castillo has been researching the Gay & Lesbian Archive of Mid-America at the University of Missouri. Within the university collection is a two-volume scrapbook organized by Phyllis Shafer, mother of Drew Shafer, an LGBT activist who died in 1989 due to complications from HIV. In this publication, Phyllis brought together journalistic articles published in Kansas City with the same narrative focus: comments regarding homosexuality. The organizer carefully distributed these clippings and pasted them on different wallpaper textures, sometimes accompanied by notes. By digitizing part of these volumes, Castillo expands the limits of paper sheets to dialogue with the three-dimensionality of architecture, bringing these newspaper pages from the space of intimacy and the diary to public debate and for a more physical contemplation of spectators. Wallpapers, prints, etchings, and drawings make up delicate installations that lead us to reflect on the notion of the archive, the many public narratives around counter-hegemonic bodies, and the love between mothers and children. For Castillo, the archive and printed publications are excellent sources of investigation.
Sean Nash's research moves between the painting and sculpture studio and the alchemy laboratory. Interested in the relationships between agriculture, food preparation, and how these processes create multisensory shapes, colors, odors, and tastes, the artist has developed works collaborating with farmers, bakers, and bacteria and microbes that alter the initial state of his experiments. For this exhibition, the artist chose to deepen his research into languages between painting and sculpture, often through molds of vegetables. They suggest forms related to the aquatic universe – shells, whelks, and mollusks - whose surfaces are composed of fragments that indicate not only a texture similar to that of marine fossils but also a pictorial research that is not afraid of the notion of excess. The public is invited to reflect on transformation, trans cultures, and intersections of species through the artist’s colors, sculptural forms, and the species surrounding us, which comprise the environment and our food.
Finally, Sun Young Park delves into the many shapes and articulations that clay can take through your hands. More than that, it is a work that considers the action of heat, waiting times, and the many ways colors are applied to its surface, like any fired ceramic piece. With organic shapes that suggest both parts of the human body and the creation of new biomes, her investigation draws attention not only to the intelligent way in which she combines different sizes of ceramic pieces but also to how her pieces integrate an exhibition space – sometimes directly on the floor, other times supported by furniture, her works are presented to the public as characters present themselves in a fictional narrative. Between translucent and opaque, her images capture our attention and invite us to an act of enjoyment that will always notice different details in their small textures, types of polishing, and subtle encounters of colors.
This exhibition is an essential small sample of the diversity of artistic practices in Kansas City and, consequently, the region commonly/fictionally called the Midwest of the United States. As a Brazilian author and curator who recently moved to this region - precisely to Denver - and to this continental country, visiting the various artists' studios shortlisted for the Charlotte Street Fellow 2023 was essential to complexify my knowledge regarding the many artistic geographies from the United States. In this exhibition, we have before our eyes artists whose practice is guided by the desire for experimentation, response to architecture, and the interest in taking risks.
I invite the public, just as I did when writing this text, to learn from the works gathered here and reconsider their certainties about aspects of our daily lives and the relationships we build all the time with images. May the works gathered here resonate not only in Kansas City and the state of Missouri but also in distant and transcontinental territories.
(texto produzido para a exposição Charlotte Street 2023 no Nerman Museum of Contemporary, em Kansas City, Estados Unidos, entre 17 de novembro de 2023 e 14 de abril de 2024)