The Charleston arts scene has space issues.
Citywide pressures on square footage can be a non-starter for many artists living and working around town, particularly those whose vision involves a big stretch of space.
Still, this fall, there are places making way for works of scale and ambition. Whether making hay at the College of Charleston or popping up opportunistically at the Navy Yard, there are encouraging signs of how this city can continue to make way for contemporary art.
Now at the Halsey
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art regularly leverages its Calhoun Street locale on the College of Charleston campus to keep the arts front, center and substantial on the peninsula.
As a commissioning gallery, the Halsey can afford artists a place not only to dream new works of scope and ambition, but also to own them thereafter. Take “Kenny Nguyen: The Divine Eye.” The solo exhibition, which is up through Dec.6, features the work of the Charlotte-based artist who grew up in southern Vietnam.
Its showstopper is “The Great Palace Installation,” an undulating, majestic abstraction exploring Vietnam’s spiritual and cultural history through the lens of Caodaism, a syncretic religion founded there in the 1920s that fuses Eastern and Western philosophies.
At once sweeping and intricate, it takes the form of massive, woven swaths of artist’s canvas, each dipped in rivulets of multi-colored acrylic paint, which swirl down in a sort of marbleized effect that has been formed into patterns and shapes. Strips of translucent hand-cut silk are set in the paint with some left untouched to flutter.
It grandly ripples along a Halsey wall, then fills the gallery with 18 canvas columns floating from the ceiling, its silk swaying off the ground. Nearby, “The Divine Eye” rounds the cloth into an unclosed circle, a vast variegated, deep blue iris gazing out.
The exhibition is paired with another solo show, its scale shaped by the thematic distance it covers rather than measurements. A convergence of clay and sound, it mines movement and immigration in the American South.
Clay vessels arranged on a cobalt blue wall inset are amplified by sound. Poems written on printed paper with clay are a dialogue with dust, a rumination on displacement. One reflects on the “soft bravery” of celebrated enslaved Edgefield potter David Drake, observing “we both/ speak/through mud/on the same land/that never belonged to us.” Another sprays the silhouette of a ginkgo leaf with clay.
“Recommissioned” at Navy Yard
Then there is “Recommissioned,” the stunner of a show that speedily slipped into the space in Storehouse 8 of the Navy Yard, so fresh from its rehab parts of the floor it inhabits are still taped off with construction plastic.
When Lindsay Collins, the exhibition’s curator, spotted a sliver of time when construction on one was complete, she got the go-ahead for a show, wrangled five artists and firmed up logistics in a frenetic three weeks.
[UPDATED] The resulting temporary exhibition, now extended through Nov. 30, is nothing short of a revelation.
After ascending a flight of stairs, travel a hall to a reception table. Turn the corner, and the vastness of this proposition seizes you. Along the capacious main room swooping through the main span of the storehouse, then leading into connecting rooms.
In a phenomenal flow of outsize canvases, sculptures and installations, finely finished pristine white walls, floors and ceilings, too, embrace and frame the diverse expressive styles of five artists whose works regularly require such a generosity of square footage.
On the far end of the space, Paul Cristina’s work entices, with dense, seductive large-scale oil on canvas works like “Inversions of Rome” and “CPNDRD,” sleeky and teeming with inscrutable, organic-seeming, gleaming forms that co-exist in dynamic interplay. Others, like “Dead Culture Cartoon” and “Sleeping with Strangers” read like some curious creatures, eerily evocative and transfixing.
Popping smartly along the span of the main room, Jeremy Croft’s oil paintings of slickly rendered retro vacuum cleaners bearing familiar brand names like Hoover, Electrolux, Toolkraft and Viking. Marching merrily along the wall, they recall that June Cleaveresque moment in the American experience promising a similar hum of domestic prosperity, one engineered to be as fetchingly bright as the saturated oils with which Croft coats his canvases.
Across from them, Nathan McClements goes large with the likes of a ten-gallon hat, or at least the silhouette of cowboy hats, by way of acrylic-on-canvas paintings that fill them with leaves or, in the case the printed canvas “Big Red Roller,” complete it with a mustachioed man.
These offer a counterpoint to works by Fletcher Williams III, most installed in the next room, which further his mining the shortfall of the American dream, with iconic motifs repurposed.
In “American Divinity,” pickets from fences are forged from sharp steel to framed blue stained glass, transforming the light pouring in from windows into ruminative blue squares throughout the room, and furthering the artist’s use of the picket as a symbol of a divided country. “Freedman’s Flag” is crafted from the rusted remnants of a tin roof; a steel rectangular sculpture encases pine and Palmetto stalks in yellow acrylic.
Further on, and we are in the realm of Hirona Matsuda. In a room enshrouded by a voluminous white curtain, “All That Remains,” is flanked by “Crepitations I” and “Crepitations II,” two large white square works on opposite walls that are meant to be touched, its crinkled glassinine and plastic film rustling like an apparition beneath your finger tips. “Gossamer Cloud,” deconstructed blinds and monofilament fixed from above, are spirited sculptural wisps.
It is hard not to leave the show astounded by the size of the feat, both with each work and with the collective effort that is hardwon for artists in Charleston right now.
Soon, these magnificent, light-filled rooms will fulfill their intended purpose. But art lovers, take heart: Another massive arts happening heads to the Navy Yard on Nov. 22 when Kulture Klash fills another building with works by more than 100 visual artists and 10 musical performers.
Until then and well beyond, I’ll be hard-pressed to forget that astounding sliver of time of this encouraging current show, when bold, expressive bursts lavished the walls and ethereal sculptures haunted.
If you want to go: “Kenny Nguyen: The Divine Eye” and “Raheleh Filsoofi: At the Edge of Arrival” are on view at the College of Charleston Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art,” 161 Calhoun St., through Dec. 6. More: halsey.charleston.edu
“Recommissioned” is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Nov. 30 at the Navy Yard, Storehouse 8, 2154 Noisette Blvd. More: Follow Lindsay Collins in Instagram, @lindsaycollinz
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