Paul Stephen Benjamin
"Summer Breeze," 2018, on exhibit in State of the Art: Record at the LSU Museum of Art
In abstract painter Kellie Romany’s performative work “Can I Get a Witness,” paint pours, drips, tumbles, and stretches its way from one vessel to another. In various viscosities and shades of human flesh, the paint is weighted by gravity, swayed by a breath, ever drying.
For the opening reception of the LSU Museum of Art’s high profile exhibition State of the Art: Record in March, Romany read from an original poem, asking:
“Can I get a witness?
To stand still
Take note
Connect . . . ”
The work will remain on display at the LSU Museum of Art throughout the run of the exhibition, which features works by twenty American artists, organized around the concept of “record”. Used as a connective thread to tie together contemporary explorations of the current moment—in mediums ranging from a computer game to video installation to sculpture—the theme invites a wealth of interpretations as viewers wander through the exhibition’s three sections: “Preserving History,” “(Re)Constructing History,” and “Finding Order”.
“Can I Get a Witness” is one of Romany’s two works in the exhibition, both of which feature cell-like ceramic catchalls containing oil paint in shades borrowed from nineteenth century ethnographer Felix von Luschan’s chromatic scale of skin color, which was used to determine an individual’s race up until the 1950s. Presenting the vessels as metaphors for bodies, Romany encourages viewers to contemplate human connection on a cellular level. “Can I Get a Witness” presents a real-time metaphor for the transmission that connection fosters while her other work, an interactive installation titled “In an Effort to be Held,” invites the viewer to touch, feel, and move the catchalls around a tabletop. “What does it look like that you are invited to touch this piece?” asked Romany at the opening. “To hold it? I encourage you to think of it as a metaphor for the body, and how it leads people to interact with each other’s bodies, changing each other.”
I spent some time with the installation, examining the ways the paint has dried over time—with its diverse wrinkles and smudges—and shifting the vessels around, piling them atop each other, making my mark in the work’s ever-shifting legacy. Behind me Paul Stephen Benjamin’s video installation “Summer Breeze” filled the room with the sounds of Jill Scott and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” a song written in 1937 in protest of the lynching of Black Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.
“It’s a very powerful song,” said Romany. “I love that these two pieces get to interact with each other, these two pieces about trauma and bodies.”
State of the Art: Record, which was funded by Bank of America and Art Bridges, is an ancillary traveling exhibition organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas—which originally hosted the State of the Art exhibition featuring sixty-one artists in early 2020.
In addition to Romany and Benjamin’s works, I was especially drawn to Carla Edwards’ “Bonfire”—a quilted work made up of strips of American flags, Marcel Pardo Ariza’s “Julie & Lu,” which combines historical and contemporary photographs of queer people’s arms, legs, hands, and feet—connecting them across time; and Kate Budd’s “collection” of artifacts—which include a “Tiny Bound Egg,” a “Bronze Sucker,” and a “Puckered Coin,”—created as the remnants of an imagined matriarchal Scottish society.
Grand in scale, State of the Art is one of the most compelling exhibitions to visit Baton Rouge in some time. Be sure to set aside an hour or two (you won’t want to rush this one) to visit while it is here through June 19, and to keep an eye out for exciting associated artist visits and other programming throughout its run.
