Desi LaPoole
Contributing Writer
When you first walk into Allison Saar’s show “Breach,” you are met with the striking figure of a curvaceous woman put together with rusted tin as she balances a tower of trunks, washtubs and cast iron skillets on her head. The figure is standing on top of a raft, broad shouldered and proud as she holds an oar in her hands, the paddle disappearing into the floor as if submerged in water.
“Breach” is one of two new exhibits in the College of Wooster Art Museum. “Breach” highlights the cultural relationship between African Americans and rivers, and how disasters in these areas influence art, music and literature. “Just as Hurricane Katrina influenced aspects of 21st-century race relations in the United States, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 did the same in the early 20th-century,” exhibit director and curator Kitty Zurko explains.
Saar uses these two events as inspiration to explore riverine life in African American culture.
The second exhibit in the CWAM doesn’t stray far from the theme of water. Amber Kempthorn’s “A River Isn’t Too Much Love” highlights the minutiae and melancholy of everyday life through detailed drawings and collages. Her art constitutes an erratic display of both nature and material objects spread out on cool pastel backgrounds. Her painting, “Duke,” includes The Great Gatsby, an Igloo cooler, a worn out lawn chair and a blue herring placed haphazardly across the piece. Underneath a dark sky full of sparkling stars and a crescent moon is a man in Old Western cowboy attire looking longingly into the horizon, his lower half disappearing into an eerie blue sea.
The repetition of sea and sky in Kempthorn’s work is apparent. As Kempthorn states, “[the sea and sky] reflects my interest in liminality or the space between, and the manner in which our thoughts and memories transition from one another.” As the collages in “Duke” leap from tiny elves carrying The Great Gatsby to a child’s pair of shoes on the edge of the sea, so too does your mind from one topic to the other.
Both Saar and Kempthorn dive into two thought-provoking topics regarding culture and the human psyche. Saar’s work depicts women and men dancing bare in knee-deep and waist-deep water, emulating one of the many ways African Americans have cultural ties to riverine life. The people in her art carrying loads of necessities on their heads and shoulders show how the “gravity defying load speaks to the limits of human endurance”.
Kempthorn’s use of spray paint, pastels and collages create striking color and images in her surreal paintings. The arrangement of space and both primary and attendant imagery in each drawing follows the rules of a strange hierarchy memory creates. These two shows are sure to create a sense of wonder about the human condition, and the strange aspects life entails.
“Breach” and “A River Isn’t Too Much Love” will be open in The College of Wooster Art Museum until March 10, 2017.