The CAN Foundation, in collaboration with Visible Records, presents, ‘Together at the End’. opening May 13th at 7 pm at the CAN Headquarters (9601 Warwick Blvd, Newport News, VA). The exhibition will be on view through June 17th.
Throughout the month of April, ‘The Residency Exchange’ participating artists from the Visible Records community, Charlie Lambert, Yusuf Abdul Lateef, and Particia Nguyen, visited the CAN Headquarters for a residency program. In exchange, Nadd Harvin, sent by the CAN, traveled to Charlottesville, VA, to complete an exhibition at Visible Records. While in Newport News, each of the three visiting artists were given a week to produce work, building on and adding to the contributions of the artist that preceded them. Although the residency was a shared experience, each participant played a unique and individual role, as their placement in sequence (beginning, middle, or end) had an impact on how they found and interacted with the installation. Their efforts have resulted in a collaborative exhibition in which the participants found themselves ‘together at the end’.
Conceptual artist, Charlie Lambert, arrived from New York and began working on a blank canvas. In gathering objects at scrap yards and the shoreline of Hampton Roads beaches, he developed work focused on the found object and relation to place, hinting at beauty, structure, danger, and obstructions. The work nods to his experience in and view on an unfamiliar city, understanding that his short stay and interaction with Newport News offered a small and inevitably limited summation of the place as a whole. The use of the color pink, reflected in a Virginia sunset, softens an unsettling backdrop of military, steel, metal, and histories not far gone.
Yusuf Abdul Lateef arrived from Toledo next. As he describes it, his experience was like that of a passenger rowing into a thick fog, making buoys floating in a cast sea of potential. His week-long residency offered a chance to step outside of himself and his work, looking at both from a new vantage point. Working through the weight of unknowing, his expressions ,‘soul speak’, became an investigation and attempt to communicate through objects, the intangible. Multimedia creations made of a mix of canvas, paint, tape, moving blankets, wood, found objects, and clay, offer coded messages about the artist’s personal explorations inward, his response to what was left for him to find, and his personal journey in an unknown space and place.
Visiting from Chicago, multidisciplinary artist,Patricia Nguyen,arrived and found herself in contemplation about what was left for her to complete. She began rounding out the exhibition by adding drawings of boats marked with pink lines made of paint and thread, photographs, and a collaborative painting. Nguyen completed a performance piece on film that allows the viewer to travel with her from the CAN HQ to the James River pulling the burden of wooden crates by pink rope behind her, a commentary on the Vietnamese diaspora and the wooden vessels that carried her parents, and so many others, across the water to the United States. The color pink, a recurring hue in the exhibition, a dainty distraction or softened layer existing on top of darker hidden histories and truths.
The collaborative exhibition has culminated in a through line of varied and provoked perspectives in space and time, the use and manipulation of objects to describe experience; personal and collective journeys and histories, and the stories that water and places carry.