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In Cleveland, industry and urbanity meet on the Lake Erie shoreline. Century-old churches share street corners with neon signs, billboards and seedy neighborhood bars. Cleveland's industrial past remains part of the present, despite the fact that the glory days of steel production are long gone. The deep gray soot that coats the brick facades of old stone buildings and sleek skyscrapers is a part of our collective psyche and our individual identities.
Geographies of Intelligence: The Recorded Image, Imagination, and Identity , currently on view at the Heights Arts Gallery, includes the work of three artists who explore natural and manmade surroundings using film and photography. Some of the most striking works in the show are by Michael Levy, who has worked as a Plain Dealer staff photographer for the last 11 years. Levy's photographs reveal a highly complex city bursting with images, architectural details, ad copy and religious iconography. Levy masterfully conveys this complexity two-dimensionally, undermining the flatness of photographs through brilliantly organized compositions. St. Michael the Archangel Church and gas station (4/1/96) depicts the intersection of Scranton Road and Clark Avenue on the near West Side. The cathedral, which looms claustrophobically near the edge of the street, dwarfs the gas station, with its blatantly crass patriotic blue-and-white painted stars and neon sign. The image perfectly portrays the sacred and profane — Catholicism and consumerism, all on one street corner.
“I have not set out to judge what buildings are beautiful or ugly or good or bad,” Levy writes in his book, Cleveland's Urban Landscape: The Sacred and the Transient . “I simply present an image that shows a compressed history of time expressed through architecture and icons, both old and new.” This essence is achieved through carefully planned compositions, which transform tacky gas stations or seamy nightclubs into shapes or dashes of color, and juxtaposes them against highly detailed architectural elements. By capturing the flash of a neon sign with a century-old sculpture of an archangel, Levy fuses the past and the present, the spiritual and the material.
The exhibit also includes a film titled From Pompeii to Xenia , by Kevin Everson, assistant professor of art at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Everson's film is about love and loss in the context of two historical disasters: the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii on August 24, 79 AD, and the tornado tragedy of Xenia, Ohio on April 3, 1974. Following a silent film-like text screen that reads, “Love, Love,” a young African-American couple is shown in the woods, kissing and frolicking beneath a checkered blanket. This carefree scene is followed by another text screen that reads “The Storm,” an overture to footage of a tornado interspersed with written quotes from a witness: “34 people was [sic] killed. We lost 34 people,” as well as a woman's voice saying things like, “The environment was increasingly unstable.” Everson's film conveys the vulnerability of humans to the erratic forces of nature. By contrasting intimate human relationships with environmental disasters, Everson also exposes the instability of human relationships, and references the primal, timeless spirit of intimate relationships.
While Levy and Everson's works are visceral examinations of the ways geography and the environment shape identity and existence, the photographs of Kent State University assistant professor Lori Kella are more conceptual, referencing topographic features. Kella strings and weaves beads and arranges them atop textured materials to form compositions that appear as coastlines or riverbeds; she then photographs the meticulously rendered constructions.
As formal works of art, Kella's photographs are aesthetically appealing, but the convoluted creative process dilutes the meaning. Titles of the photographs are instructive, referring to specific places like Newfoundland's Stephenville Crossing and Torrent River, but the assemblages and photographs offer few clues for deciphering the content of the work. There is a degree of universality to the images; the shoreline at Stephenville Crossing could easily be a place on the Lake Erie shoreline, or a spot along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. But this vague allusion to geographic universality is not enough to make the work exceptionally compelling. Nonetheless, the images are enchanting as abstract studies in color, line and texture.
Geographies
of Intelligence: The Recorded Image, Imagination, and Identity
lives up to its subtitle, smartly examining the ways natural and synthetic
environments affect and shape our imagination and identity.