Mysterious Realms: The Dream World in the Work of Sara Valta and Marc Chagall

True fantasy is a lost art in the modern age, only to be found in the nooks and crannies of the world. Yes, there is fantasy, that pseudo-medieval world inhabited by orcs, elves and dragons, but I am speaking of the fantastic. Not the hyped, or the over-glorified, but the subtle, the strange, the vivid, and the mystical. One modern example is to be found in the webcomic world, a thick forest of imagination that by now has reached an age where there's old growth. Not necessarily in the age of the comic itself, but where creativity has spread its gnarled roots.

Sara Valta's Alchemilla is the delightfully wet mat of leaves that coat the forest floor in the autumn, turning into mulch underfoot and floating odors most pungent through the nostrils. Well, depends on where you live; that doesn't happen around here, although I *have* had the pleasure of visiting a friend's family vacation home in Wisconsin, where the forests do indeed have leaves piled thick and deep. You get the picture, though. There's something earthy to her work, a feeling of decay that isn't the dull stink of death, but rather that continual recycling of life that is the forest itself. It's not just the hues and tones she chooses to depict her world and characters, each of whom is a vibrant individual that inhabits a rich, otherworldly, and yet absolutely human world of flaws and foibles; it's the overflowing details, the potent expressions on people's faces, the chaotic bustle of the city in which her story takes place, the festivals, celebrations and messiness of day to day existence laid bare.

Well, there's monsters there too; Valta's world is full of them! Goblins, trolls, fantastic beasties and what have you. But these are humans in monster's skin; underneath all their warts and scales are worrywarts and depressed drunks. Delectably rendered in watercolor-like blotches, the stage is set at a magical social worker's office that deals with downtrodden magical folk. The counselor is a wizard. Who doesn't wizard, but from his scruffy, ill-kept beard to his limpid pools of eyes and long, flowing robe, it is an open secret hiding in plain sight. Which is to say it isn't hidden. He's a wizard. Who doesn't wizard.

That said, dealing with disembodied heads of Trojan heroes, sirens whose siren song can't lure sailors to their doom, and an overly messianic plant-like being inhabiting the body of a cat must be considered some type of magic. Datura, you know. Takes you, rattles you up and shakes you to the bone. You'll see once you read the comic.

It is within this world of monsters as people and people as monsters, that the grey area grows vast and you start wondering about what's truly human. And none of the protagonists in this series are as dear to the heart as our most magnificent guide to the human spirit, Valo. Valo is a conundrum that is wrapped up in a numbnut who is so totally crass and out-of-control, yet guiding one ever closer in to understanding what is at the root of being human. As one reads through the strip, Valo seems to stay the same but the direction we are looking at them shifts, revealing new facets as one rotates around a person who just can't help but being who they are, and being it very loudly. If you are enormously irritated with the character the first time you meet them in the comic, then Valo's done their job of being Valo.

I won't spoil things further. The story is sinuous and organic, like a vine coiling around abandoned masonry out in the middle of a grassy meadow, and is worth being revealed through reading it yourself. Several times illusion is called up in the comic, and these dream-like worlds that parallel the "real" world, like drifting clouds, are as mirrors to the psyche of the characters. But the way Sara Valta depicts her world is like a dream, with a romanticism for architecture and texture.

Like a dream. That's where we touch on the true essence of fantasy. Fantasy is actually more complicated than just a dream, because it is conscious, waking minds which create the fantastic in art and literature, even if its root might be in the fertile mulch of the subconscious. Somehow, the seemingly irrational connections of our mind's undergrowth survive the waking process to become paintings, sculptures, sketches and poetry; whatever the medium used, the result is wild, unrestrained imagination. And it is there that Valta's visual story finds common cause with the Russian painter Marc Chagall.

A recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art brought a lesser-known facet of this early Modernist's work to light; that of his work on costume and set design for ballets and operas. The exhibition, "Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage," was fascinating in one major aspect, as it showed how Chagall took his imagination from two dimensions to three. Graphite sketches filled out with gouache, watercolors, and india ink were his version of what we in the twenty-first century would call concept art. They practically sprang from his mind's eye onto the paper, so lively and lyrical are their poses!

Yet, these were precursors to the final result; magnificent, crude, bold ensembles, cut from cloth, adorned with animal hair, papier-mâché, and other accessories, and finally painted by hand, courtesy of Chagall himself. These costumes depict maidens, beasts, monsters, fairy kings and queens, and those constructing them put in great effort to ensure they were faithful reproductions of Chagall's initial designs. Oh, to see these magical creations worn in real life, dancing about the stage!

Chagall's creatures would not find an easy box to fit into, using today's tropes and categories. They are fantastical, yet one would be hard pressed to label them fantasy, as we would define them using contemporary fiction's world of orcs, elves, dragons and ents. Fantasy nowadays is a bit of a straitjacket; born from J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal epic, itself influenced by Norse ancestry, married to a twisted and tweaked interpretation of the Middle Ages, most everything we call fantasy is set to a certain rhyme, iterations of a time half-remembered, but reimagined. In a way, it is a method of making sense of our past. Orcs, goblins, bugbears and other dark entities represent the other; cultures which we may have seen as alien and frightening. Elves are manifestations of the exotic; distant, unreachable, yet desirable. Dragons, of course, are the wild, untamed power of nature, the beast unleashed. Imagination uses metaphors as the language with which it describes reality, and fantasy is modern day memory (just as science fiction is our way of contemplating the future).

But dreams draw from a different well. Dreams do not have to make sense, and indeed often don't. You can argue about retcons and inconsistencies in the stories of Middle Earth, Warcraft, and Game of Thrones, but the primeval power of dreams cares not for continuity or logic. When we talk about fantasy as the mainstream genre, this power does not figure into the discussion, except for the bare threads of discord that creep into it from the most gifted dreamers. Fantasy as imagination, is about what inhabits the realm between the conscious and the subconscious.

That is the thread that weaves together Alchemilla and Marc Chagall. Chagall's costumes, and the seeds behind them, are such a madman's stitch of reality and the fantastical that it is hard to discern which came from where. But sometimes, the lines are there. Chagall's time in North America, as well as Mexico (which for obscure labor union laws he visited in order to paint the backdrops for his operas) must have suffused him with inspiration. In his costumes for the Firebird, you can see how Native American katsinas, such as the Squash Katsina, were recalled in his imagination to become the monstrous servants of the dark prince, Koschei. Another "monster", with a black, domed head, replete with multi-colored polka dots, is so similar to the Zuni Kokoshori (loosely translated as Firewalker) Katsina as to be indistinguishable. These spirits, so artfully depicted by generations of Native Americans, lit a sympathetic fire in Chagall's heart. Russian folklore is full of similar creatures, gods, witches and ogres, and to him the fraternity between the two cultures was clear. He paid homage to their brotherhood by bringing their deities to life in what was to him a contemporary creation of myth.

There is no great degree of separation between mythology and modern fantasy. You could argue that they are the same thing, just from different eras, one being the ancient past, the other, the present. Yet there is something missing in much of today's fiction. A crucial element, a missing link, something which deadens the art despite having more special effects, more grandiosity, more oomph and wow and pizzazz than we have ever had in our stories, and that is imaginative thinking.

Imagination is qualitatively different from what we currently have, which is imitation. Imagination is the mind's willingness to let go, and to walk into uncharted territories. It is where the constraints of logic and reason are relaxed, and more subtle connections are explored. Imagination is not without its own rules; it does not come from nothing. Indeed, it is drawn directly from experience. The alchemical transmutation that occurs follows lines of relation that our conscious mind cannot fathom, but which exist nonetheless.

This is the wilderness that Chagall so passionately inhabited, and which in her own way, Valta speculatively investigates, as carefully as a gardener, planting seeds which bear growth as dreamscapes and ghosts and divine entities. At the same time, her comic Alchemilla is so very grounded in the human world. Its characters deal with issues as mundane as a janitor grumbling as he cleans up yet another mess, of skipping work or running away from home to find a moment of sanctuary with a relative stranger. Chagall worked in the opposite direction; in a time where the chains of reality were closing in, when the industrial age was making man into machine, he sought to liberate the mind from its bonds, giving us vast playgrounds that verged on the nonsensical. Though their approaches differ, each shares a rare gift to those of us seeking the mysterious in life.

You can read Alchemilla here. Start at the beginning.

Though now closed, you can visit the exhibition page for LACMA's "Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage" here.

Further reading: Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell's exhibition review in Ornament Magazine.
Julia Felsenthal's 2015 review of the show at the Fenimore Art Museum in Vogue.
A historical overview of the LACMA show by Discover Los Angeles.

Photographs by Patrick Benesh-Liu/NineWindBao.

Hall-Barnett Gallery in NOLA

CERAMIC MASKS by Magda Boreysza.

My first visit to New Orleans found me loving a culture that I was not a part of, didn't quite fit, and nonetheless feel at home in. Whenever you travel, you find both that people are people, everywhere, and that simultaneously the pace of life, the common expression of courtesy, and ways of communicating can differ enormously. A place's rhythm is the human beings that live there. In New Orleans, it felt like life is set to a slower beat, where people wanted to enjoy their time. A restaurant where one can sense the deep, abiding pleasure in doing things as they've always done, roots running thick into the past, a stranger on the street who fist bumps you just because he digs the way you're looking, the gentle waves of breeze washing over and through the one way streets out to the water, the city's romance seems to stem from reveling in the present moment. Life is here and now, in all its wonder and unpleasantness, and you'd better carpe-the-fucking-damn-diem.

Beyond having great food and good company, visiting the SNAG Conference, I made sure to take a day off for myself. That led to a visit to a gallery on Chartres Street (That's pronounced "Charter", not the French way!). The first time I'd seen it was on Tuesday night, after I'd finished dinner and went out exploring the city. The light from the gallery shone out onto the streets, and through the display window on the closest side to the street stared solemn sentinels, totemic guardians and tricksters, ceramic visages for animal spirits. Of that first night, I knew I liked it. The work was that of Magda Boreysza, and the place is Hall-Barnett Gallery.

Magda Boreysza spans both prints and her masks in her oeuvre, and the unearthly quality of her work calls to the same primal well that gives birth to Native shamanic and spiritual art. A Polish immigrant who came to New Orleans, Magda has a fascination with transformation, and the connection between human animal and the rest of our shared kingdom. Her illustrations have as their subject diaphanous waifs of androgynous girls who mingle, cohabitate, and indeed merge with strange denizens. Magda makes the point of blending the boundary between the two, while keeping each entity recognizably separate. In one print, the woman is submerged into the body of a beast that seems like a cross between a tiger and a Tasmanian devil. Her hair becomes the creature's mane; an arm projects itself into a forelimb, while she herself appears to be swimming within the greater gestalt. What makes the beast even more fantastical is the giant, deep, black claws, and the shaggy mounds of hair that flow from its body like cilia. Is this woman-beast a deeper commentary on the animalistic urges that reside within us? Or is it a statement to remind that while we have disconnected our identity from those of other animals, we are actually all part of one vast continuum? None of these have to be what this particular piece represents, as is true with all art, the message is in the eye of the beholder.

ILLUSTRATION PRINT by Magda Boreysza.

SPIRIT ANIMAL TAXIDERMY by Merrilee Challiss.

A FLOCK OF OLD MEN.

Holly Barnett, the owner, reopened the gallery after her father Howard, the founder of Hall-Barnett, passed away. Once you actually get inside, and stop window gawking, you enter an otherworldly realm. Mrs. Barnett has curated the space to include representatives of the South's best artists, emerging and established, and from the looks of it, there is a unique brew of influences, environment and culture as diverse as New Orleans is itself that informs their aesthetic. It's emotion from the gut; raw, re-interpreted, simplified, twisted, embellished. Even the gaudy is rendered impressive when done in scale. A taxidermied deer that has been completely covered in a mosaic patchwork of miniature sequins is a harkening to the vivacious exuberance of Mardi Gras. Snakes, mirror pupils and flamboyant decoration transform the trophy into some larger-than-life apparition, existing in that delicate space between spectacle and respectability. These totems, made by Merrilee Challiss, which she dubs Spirit Animal Taxidermy, are the tip of the iceberg here.

Sometimes there is a lightheartedness and sincerity in the normal everyday. A Flock of Old Men has five balding old fogies dabbed together with a bare minimum of brush strokes, thick, textured, and exuberant. A rather stunning capture of a moment in time, wavering between past and present. Those who are being so majestically rendered however seem to be cheekily aware of their own portrayal, and with the lack of caring that can only come with age, leads each into being an intense character in this brief tableau.

JACQUE GROVES AND HOLLY BARNETT.

Hall-Barnett Gallery has been exhibiting the prints of Jim Steg for many years now, and so had available a brochure on his work. As it so happened, there is a retrospective of Steg's at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which is open through October 8th. A teacher of printmaking at Newcomb College, Steg was somewhat of a trickster; he was a member of the infantry engineering unit responsible for decoys during World War II. Perhaps appropriate for New Orleans, the land of a thousand haunted houses, the unit was dubbed the Ghost Army. As participant in the terrible human activity of war, Steg nevertheless managed to dabble in the surreal. The Ghost Army was responsible for making visual decoys to fool the German army into thinking Allied forces were present. This shadowplay dances on the razor's edge of absurdity, and yet it really did happen. After his return from the war, he would go on to learn, and teach, printmaking. The sheer breadth of his work spans traditional, representational sketches to absolutely wild crazy freaky shit.

I was flattered to be in the good company of Jacque Groves, who is an artist herself, and Holly Barnett, both of whom are art enthusiasts who have that emotional appreciation for, and connection to, a painting or a crafted object. That paired with a thorough understanding of the background of each artist, and a conscious choice to help raise awareness of local artists, combine to form the alchemical elixir which is Hall-Barnett Gallery.

Come get the Vodou.

Native Art from the Heard Show

Native art has always been about reconciling new influences with maintaining a lineage from past to present, and into the future. Tradition is respected because it is both one's history, and identity as a people. Within the bounds of tradition, of the lessons passed down from great grandfather to grandfather to father, and from great grandmother to grandmother to mother, there is a line that ties everything together, a collective memory that gives form and substance to life.

The vitality of that living tradition was on full display at the Heard Indian Fair & Market this March, 4 – 5, in that crossroads between cultures, the sunbathed urban expanse of Phoenix, Arizona. This was the best year I have ever seen at the Heard Museum. Despite the strife and unease that permeates our nation (or perhaps because of it), there was a sense of brilliance in the work on display, an energy that presented itself through an originality of design and composition, a keen and precise craftsmanship, a wide diversity of media and most important, a feeling of renewal, of a new generation of iterations growing from some root or trunk that was much more ancient. The synergy between experimentation and tradition has never been greater for Native art.

The Katsina carvings of Manuel Chavarria Jr. are proof that there can be a great spirit thriving within age. He is a Hopi artist who fashions very traditional katsina dolls. Katsinas have evolved much as they have become objects for sale to White customers, where katsina carvers, with modern tools and materials available to them, push the art form into magnificently complex and vibrant sculptures, often seeking to outdo themselves by whittling a massive, foot-and-a-half high katsina, poised in song and dance, from a single piece of wood.

In older days, though, katsinas were much simpler. An effigy of the spiritual being they represented, the makers of centuries past breathed life into their creations by carving vestigial limbs, etching out of the wood the barest necessity of detail needed to show a skirt, reveal a cape or depict a leering grin. Time was a resource to be invested wisely, and that bred a style of katsina where minimalism and symbolism provided all the vocabulary one had to express one's self.

Manuel takes this tradition and furthers it with a careful touch and a lyrical witticism. His use of vegetal and mineral dyes, which he applies sparingly, lends a wizened quality to his miniature beings that makes them feel as if they are much, much older than they really are. Now, actually that is not quite true. The spirits that he is making vessels for are as old as the world itself, but in his hands perhaps one should say they are as young as the world. A cheeky bending of the waist, a tilting of the head, bug eyes staring out bright as the headlamps of a truck in the desert, knees and elbows crooked at just the right angle, Manuel's dolls are playful, inquisitive, and attentive.

Raven Mask (name not known) by Jason Reed Brown. The chain links which Jason incorporated into this piece add a mystical aural component, and is a decorative element he employs in some of his other sculptures. I thought it was interesting because Siberian shamans are supposed to have an iron chain tied to their ceremonial vestments, so that in an emergency they can be dragged out from the spirit realm, with the metal chain serving as an anchor to the material world.

When diverging from the traditional ways and materials, Native identity becomes a complicated subject. Somewhere, there is a line across which one is no longer making "Indian" work, unrecognizable, a cessation of that thread that has been unbroken since days long ago. The flip side is being stereotyped. Handling the balance between those two edges, and having innovation and tradition comfortably coexisting together has been a difficult path for many Native artists, particularly younger ones, to navigate.

These last few years, and 2017 in particular, has seen that process of experimentation, of going to one extreme and then pulling back, come to a magnificent result. I saw more artwork at the Heard Fair than I ever have in the past years of attending the show that illustrated a natural ingenuity. Unforced, unpretentious, but different, original, playing with old themes in new ways; that was what made this year's fair so exciting. The forged steel sculpture of Jason Reed Brown, a Kokuyon Athabascan blacksmith from Alaska, brings forth one of the best qualities of modern Native craft; a faithful reinterpretation of old ways with new materials.

In many ways, Native art has always been a reflection of one's environment. The materials used to create it were gathered from grass, brush, wood, earth, bark, sand and stone. The symbols and creatures it depicted were gathered from one's surroundings, the local wildlife, the spirits that dwelled within rock and tree and river. Native Americans for the past few centuries have had to go through a period of intense struggle as that environment changed around them. Now for many, instead of the gentle expanse of nature and the quiet havens there is asphalt, concrete, noise, smoke and metal.

Jason, like many youthful Native artists, have tackled this strange new world and wrestled from it the one purifying action for any alien landscape; rendering it into objects that are recognizable and have meaning. He hammers steel into bold, archaic statuary, totemized animals and spirits that use the same vocabulary of shapes, formlines, ovoids, U forms and S forms, as the Northwest Coast art of olden days. However, the magic touch is his inclusion of the original soul of the steel, recycling rivets as eyes, using checkered plate as textured skin, integrating old industrial grips as a fish's fins or Raven's piercing gaze. The beauty of this re-use is clear. What was old, discarded, dead, forgotten has seen the light of a new day in this spiritual transformation, a rebirth that sees the valueless becoming valuable, that which was aimless now full of power and intent. It is utterly magnificent.

Salmon I by Jason Reed Brown of steel and copper.

In Manuel Chavarria Jr. and Jason Reed Brown, we see two poles in contemporary Native artwork that has common ground. Both have the ability to innovate on tradition in a way that respects the past, while keeping some essential spark that makes their work feel alive, wild, and free. That spark is called honesty, and can be found anywhere that the process is elevated above the desired end result. Native American art and craft is currently experience a surfeit of that creative force, and the results speak for themselves.

Jason Reed Brown's work is at hammerhandforge.com. Manuel Chavarria Jr. you can find either on Facebook, or if you google his name you can find a few galleries which sell his work.

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Front and back of Hummingbird I sculpture by Jason Reed Brown. I'd originally thought it was like a totem pole, a tripartite stack of bird, animal, and fish. Perhaps that's what a hummingbird actually is.