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A Fine Sense of the Absurd: Ed Shewmake memorial show also a benefit for Artworks; at SEED, a clever look at consumerism
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Ed Shewmake titled the large oil painting on the right Showoff. At left is Clark Whittington's mixed media work titled 'miss x 3' (eighteen years later).
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Published: February 22, 2009
Artist Ed Shewmake's death in September at 87 marked a sad milestone on the local art scene. Shewmake taught art at Salem College for more than 30 years and played a key role in the emergence of Winston-
Salem's visual-art community during and after the 1950s. A prolific painter, sculptor and printmaker, he also left behind a substantial body of work at his death.
A generous sampling of that work is on view through Saturday in a memorial exhibition at Artworks Gallery, which Shewmake helped found 25 years ago. His widow Mitzi Shewmake (also a sculptor and Artworks founder) and daughters Tenley and Tiffin have designated Artworks as the beneficiary of all proceeds from sales of the about 60 works in the "Ed Shewmake Memorial Exhibition."
Shewmake got his artistic start drawing cartoons for the student humor magazine at Davidson College, where he was an undergraduate in the early 1940s. That background informed much of his subsequent work, which often reflects a sharp eye for absurdity and a deadpan sense of humor.
Shewmake resisted taking himself or his art too seriously. Such an attitude is generally healthy, but it can have its drawbacks. For example, he almost never dated his works, making it virtually impossible to track the chronology of his career through his art. I could find only one exception to this rule in the entire show, a 1975 etching titled Woman, in which seven free-floating, stone-like forms are configured to suggest an armless and faceless female figure. He took the same abstractionist approach in rendering four figures reclining on a beach in his oil painting titled Bathers, which might date from around the same time.
The reductive impulse reflected in both those pieces takes various forms in most of the show's other works. The figures tend to be generalized and lacking in the details that convey specific identities. Rare exceptions include a few portraits whose titles identify their subjects by name and several distinctive ceramic or painted-wood pedestal sculptures rendered with enough detail to suggest individual personalities.
Other exhibition highlights include an abstracted landscape titled Trees, an expressionistic painting of a black Labrador retriever (Nattie Bumpo) and a more cartoonish painting titled Showoff, in which a piggish dog and a slender woman are positioned near a man driving an old-fashioned convertible roadster. Pop art's influence is evident in Shewmake's quirkily anomalous canvas depicting five boards horizontally configured to form a sign emblazoned with the legend "MEN WORKING IN TREES."
Post-consumerism at SEED
Another Downtown Arts District exhibition worth seeing -- in a more contemporary vein but also on view through Saturday -- is a cleverly provocative show by Clark Whittington and Mark Graves at SEED Gallery's outpost in the back room of Urban Artware. It's the latest manifestation of the duo's "Techno-Gaia" project, an "ongoing collaborative art experiment," in Whittington's words, whose name references the Greek earth goddess. Techno-Gaia's aims are "to speak directly to the often unnatural alliance that we all have with our creations of convenience" and "to create a greater understanding of our interaction with the natural world and the technologies that are shaping the planet and its inhabitants."
"Detritus: Post-Consumer Aesthetics," as the show is titled, includes three of Graves' sculptures and three of Whittington's paintings. The underlying theme in all cases is unbridled consumerism's deleterious environmental impact.
Both artists effectively employ assemblage strategies in this show. Graves made his internally illuminated, rudimentarily house-shaped piece titled J. Bird's house of enlightenment from scrap wood and steel food cans. His Thermal is a 7 foot tall bundle of freshly cut bamboo stalks held tightly together by a perforated, chromium-coated metal tube. And his piece titled Connective -- suggesting a funky, low-hanging chandelier -- is an automobile gas tank painted silver, encircled by a large ring and systematically wrapped in tightly stretched, black-rubber bicycle inner-tubes.
Attached to the surfaces of Whittington's candy-colored, abstract-expressionist-influenced paintings are a variety of ordinary objects including sticks, bottle caps, pill bottles, vinyl record albums, plastic bicycle reflectors, electronic components, Q-tips and rubber bands -- stuff that often winds up in landfills. They are striking works whose salvaged components invite close inspection and prompt second thoughts about our wasteful habits.
The show also includes a number of identical, hermetically sealed, clear-plastic packages labeled "Detritus," displayed in an oil drum in the center of the gallery. Containing ersatz wood chips that are, in fact, environmentally toxic scraps from shredded automobile tires, each packet is signed, numbered and imprinted with the words "LIMITED EDITION VOLATILE SAUSAGE." At $5 each, they're affordably priced for tough economic times, as are the logo-imprinted "Techno-Gaia" lapel buttons displayed with them ($1 each).
■ The "Ed Shewmake Memorial Exhibition" is on view through Saturday at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St. For more information, call 336-723-5890. "Detritus: Post-Consumer Aesthetics" is on view through Saturday at SEED Gallery/Urban Artware, at 207 W. Sixth St. For more information, call 336-722-2345.
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