After taking in the range of art that fills the new Chroma Projects Art Laboratory on the Downtown Mall, I realized that someone could furnish an entire home from its contents, and wind up with an interior (and plates to match) that would make a lovely spread in a shelter magazine. Owner Deborah McLeod brings together a variety of media, from furniture and jewelry to monumental sculpture and painting, in the old University Florist building. McLeod’s sedate, erudite eye turns the somewhat fractured space into a series of delightful excursions.
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“From The Beginning,” featuring paintings by Carrie Miller Payne, is the first show at Deborah McLeod’s brand new Chroma Arts Projects Laboratory (chromaprojects.com). |
Sculptor Millicent Young’s “Vehicle” is installed in the front window, an old-fashioned bicycle transformed from the mechanical into the organic, rendering it in wood, copper and wire, and exploding its size into something only a mythical creature could ride. The ethereal Young also has her own room in the gallery, filled with smaller works that map her explorations into material and texture.
The front gallery has works by 13 different artists, but, despite its modest size, still manages to feel calm and unified. So many of these painters, sculptors and draftspeople seem to be interested in meditatively detailed work. An example is the supremely talented Tate Pray, whose two graphite drawings, “The Other” and “Pet” play with our ability to examine the details of his hyper-focused renderings. In “The Other,” birds and bees zoom around a perfectly shaded flower. The work looks conventional until—unless—you notice that one of the bees has turned into a cube. Then, the work turns into an exploration of optical illusions and fantasy, as the birds merge and the flower bends and nothing seems to be as you would expect.
Isabel Manalo’s two works are almost Asian in their spareness and use of brushstroke. The painting “Lush,” where a doe bends her head to absorb the reds, purples, yellows and greens of an exuberant spring, is a dynamic, sensual meeting of paint strokes and negative space. Manalo isn’t afraid of the white of the canvas, which creates a perfect balance of chaos and quiet.
McLeod turned the space that used to be the storage room for flowers into a viewing room for Richard Knox Robinson’s short film, which uses archival footage of Skyline Drive to accompany a text drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” You can still smell the flowers while you watch the odd tourists’ rituals unfold in startling correlation to the story. I was truly moved by Robinson’s affinity for the story and the antique quality of the accompanying images, which speak to the Virginia of Poe’s time, still untamed by superhighways and superstores, when snake-handling passed for vacation entertainment and children played fearlessly in creeks.
