Archive: Rolón and the Global South, NOAR Spring/Summer 2018

 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/noar-spring-2018-lay.pdf

 

The third iteration of Prospect.3 – and its last as a biennial – took on curatorial themes of identity and “search” in the work within the exhibit.  The Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music – a multi-media installation including video, photography, and sculpture – was especially effective at communicating this theme, as it related to global affinities between New Orleans and South Vietnam. Using the tradition of the jazz funeral as a subject, the artists revealed the stunning similarities between the two cultures.  Within the video and half of the UNO-St. Claude Gallery, morphed instruments served as symbols for a shared space conversed through the language of music, and a transgender performer acted as a guide through the amorphous and liminal area. 

Carlos Rolón’s solo exhibition at New Orleans Museum of Art, “Outside/In,” shares similar content.  He explores the way cultures have commingled throughout the “global south,” particularly within the context of Puerto Rico and New Orleans.  Rolón is a first-generation immigrant to the United States; he was born in Chicago, which has strong musical ties to New Orleans as well.  There are more links than this between the history of Rolón’s personal heritage and the city, already steeped in diversity. 

One of the most striking is the decorative design of wrought iron, used to frame various mirrors.  Rolón, who was a resident at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2017, salvaged local wrought iron to make the designs, called rejas or grids, which are popular in both Puerto Rico and in the Spanish architecture in the city. Edra Soto remarked on the preeminence of this material in both cultures in the exhibition “SPECTRA” at UNO-St. Claude in 2015, during which she created the grid forms out of metallic tape.  Seeing them in a new context, in either case, evokes wonder at the ubiquity of such filigreed forms in everyday existence.

The mirrors serve an additional function. Viewers search their visages reflected either in larger panes that connect and disconnect because of the divisions of the rejas, or watch their bodies and faces fracture in assembled pieces of reflective glass. In the latter case, there is an immediate sensation of disconnection and brokenness.  Rolón makes a direct comment on the disastrous recent pasts of Puerto Rico and New Orleans in Maria, a massive wall sculpture that spirals out shards of glass – viscerally painful in an imaginative way, if the shards should actually fly out in gale force winds, and emotionally painful as the work acknowledges commonality in grief led by utter destruction.  The mirror pieces break up the reflection of the audience, but all can still find themselves shining back from the wreckage.

A larger mirror installation in the alcove in the staircase in the Grand Hallway fills the entire recessed space. Smaller mirror fragments rejoin with gold inlay, an obvious reference to Japanese kintsukuroi in which broken ceramics are mended with gold leaf.  While there is comfort in the idea that breaks can make beautiful, that same disjointed sensation occurs when one reflects. The reflection yields a Cubist portrait of the viewer, fractured and flattened from three- to two-dimensional space. (Get close enough and find a large enough plane, though, and take some time to mend a hairdo, as I observed one person doing from the front of the gallery.) 

On the second floor, a room of paintings collectively titled “Gilding the Lily” glows from the walls inward, filling the space with warm light enhanced with a bright palette of tropically hued blossoms, meticulously rendered over carefully laid 24-karat leaf.  Rolón’s background as a painter is evident here, in columns and bunches of flowers whose petals seem to fall in errant swaths of paint throughout the compositions.  Rolón studied flora throughout this region and in Puerto Rico, effectively making large-scale bouquets, like those a friend or partner would bring as a gift to another. The kindness is welcome, as these paintings seem to emanate such affection.

In the same gallery, an “impromptu” installation of cinder blocks and live plants is reminiscent of the makeshift gardens that appear in the residential and urban areas of both places. Decorated with the same kinds of tiles that appear on vases at the base of the Great Hall stairway and in a large wall work, the visual elements mask some of the roughness of the cinder block.  That sort of decorative impulse is a large part of the kinds of materials that Rolón uses in general, and of course parallels this city’s love for costuming.  It’s remarked in some of the literature about Rolón’s work that the media feels a bit out of place, or out of historical context; it’s not the kind of work to be done by a man. Locally, though, there is no discrepancy especially as it is well within the time of year for Mardi Gras Indians to be hand-sewing seed beads to canvas for next time.

The garden is also a reference to the ways walls, whether physical or metaphorical, can go up.  These are mutable walls, which can be reconfigured if not totally removed.  Another way that Rolón obliterates walls has been to collaborate with local collectives in Nomadic Habitat, a movable cart that has been activated with work by other artists in this city.  Most recently, members of Good Children Gallery participated by bedecking the structure with “humorous consumer products that purport to solve known social problems, or call attention to ones we didn’t know we had,” according to their statement.  Generic Art Solutions’ “mini monuments to no one” recall recent debates regarding public sculpture; Christopher Saucedo’s mobile brands are evocative of his work in general, which deals with equal distribution of volumes; and Aaron McNamee’s cast pill packets and bottles suggest self-medication, a rampant issue in our city. By imparting these sculptures to the space of the cart, the artists create a cabinet of wonders, and symbolically enshrine them like holy objects.  At the same time, they hang from the roof of the cart or line up in organized fashion as though a vendor would arrange them – and Rolón has collaborated with vendors using the cart in the past.

Another installation titled Bochinche, a reference to gossipy conversation among friends and the din of bar settings, provides space for reconnection.  Hand-carved marble benches arrange in seating around a fountain-like floor sculpture that employs wrought iron to house live plants arranged about and within hanging macramé sculptures.  These are emblematic both of the craft traditions that dominate the work in general, but also Rolón’s family’s use of the media. 

Tellingly, though, while observing the multiple school groups and visitors led by docents or listening in, no one sat down around the work. It’s completely enclosed by open wrought iron fences, but there is no way beyond the benches to enter it. Large “do not touch” signs throughout all the installations are prohibitive against interaction though there are invitations to do so.  Certainly the work needs protection and the benches could be read as symbolic gestures to connect rather than a literal invitation. Plus, marble, while warm and buttery, is also cold stone that is historically detached from the viewer in sculpture, and sometimes necessarily tactically.

That content aligns with the social problems that Rolón wants to address through the work.  Disjointed mirrors capture the images of multiple people who are not connecting as they move throughout the space.  Signage seems to want to discourage that connection further.  It is a kind of relief to see that this is not an exhibition about those connections being solidly made.  Rather, the work and the design of the exhibition openly acknowledge the prevalence of strong social fissures, and the difficulty if not impossibility of meshing many as one.  Still, the paintings and sculpture are imbued with hope in their elegance and warmth, and while I certainly wanted to touch, it was enough to recognize visual affinities – a feeling like shaking hands across the visual landscape Rolón provides.