Two fall shows use sculpture and photographs to fold past into present

Two exhibits this fall contemplate the expanse of time and demonstrate how artistic expression — and a focus on process — can transform our understanding of commonplace objects and materials and fold past into present.

At Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, a two-person show juxtaposes the visceral sculpture of Lynda Benglis, born in 1941 in Louisiana, with that of Norwegian textile artist Hanne Friis, born three decades later.

At Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, photographer Wendel White brings the past and the present into a shared space in the Glassboro gallery’s exhibit called “Folding Time.” The photographs are drawn from three of White’s foundational projects focusing on Black history and the legacy of slavery: “Schools for the Colored,” “Red Summer,” and “Manifest” and include haunting images of historic Black schools in Bordentown, N.J., North Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.

Hanne Friis said she was introduced to American abstract art as an art student in Northern Europe in the 1990s.

“I immediately felt a connection to this period in art history when artists like [Benglis] were experimenting with new sculptural materials and working in a very processual way,” Friis said in an email exchange upon arriving from Oslo for the opening of the exhibition at Locks.

“At that time, the art scene in northern Europe was very theoretical, conceptual, and boring, and I didn’t fit into that,” she said. “I wanted to work out my ideas through a material, or maybe the opposite, finding out new things through being in direct contact with a material.”

Both Benglis, 82, the pioneer, and Friis, the next-generation textile artist, focus on the process and the material itself, centering the act of working out ideas through direct contact with materials.

Benglis turned to hard industrial materials like stainless steel mesh, bronze, zinc, copper, and beeswax and rendered them weightless and buoyant in appearance. Art historian Amanda Gluibizzi writes in her essay for the exhibition catalog that Benglis’ “sprayed metal wall sculptures … snarl, barrel, billow, and ripple.”

Friis, working with faux leather, steel, hand-stitched cotton, and satin, creates “ecstatic folds,” Gluibizzi writes, that “flow, change direction, pucker, purse into rosettes, and develop their own structures.”

Friis said she was drawn to the energy in Benglis’ work.

“We share many of the same thought and ideas, which encourages me to become even more brave and experimental, like she always has been,” Friis said.

Her technique, which includes hand stitching, directly references “the history of textile art and women’s work,” she says, “which is something you don’t find in Benglis’ works, I think.”

“Benglis’ sculptures imitate soft materials, but are hard; my textile works imitate hard materials while they are soft,” Friis said. “We are both playing with high and low culture in the use of plastic and sometimes toxic materials, and we both transform metallic surfaces to flexible forms.”

She added: “We share the same passion for processing materials into organic formations and complex structures that gives a sense of change and growth.”

“Hanne Friis/Lynda Benglis” runs from Sept. 12 to Oct. 25 on the second floor of Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia. www.locksgallery.com

Wendel White, a New Jersey photographer who currently teaches at Stockton University, says his photographs of structures that operated as segregated schools are a continuation of his “journey through the African American landscape.”

“The photographs depict the buildings and surrounding landscapes that were associated with the system of racially segregated schools established at the southern boundaries of the Northern United States,” White said in an artist statement for the exhibition provided by Rowan. “This area, sometimes referred to as ‘Up-South,’ encompasses the Northern ‘free’ states that bordered the slave states.”

Among the schools depicted in the exhibition are the Indiana Avenue School in Atlantic City (which became Atlantic City High School’s East Campus alternative school, now closed, and was criticized in 2014 for being racially segregated); the Douglass Singerly School in North Philadelphia (now Frederick Douglass Mastery Charter School); and the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth in Bordentown, N.J., which closed in 1955 after unsuccessful efforts at integration.

In White’s photography, the landscapes surrounding the schools are digitally obscured, creating a “veil,” which White says is “a visual representation of the W.E.B. Du Bois literary metaphor of the veil as a social barrier.”

“Some of the images depict sites where the original structure is no longer present, and, as a placeholder, I have inserted silhouettes of the original building or what I imagine of the appearance of the original building.

“The remains of the ‘colored schools’ are not simply ghostly apparitions of our segregated past but the unresolved ideologies [neither living nor dead] that still haunt the American landscape,” White writes.

The exhibition also draws from White’s “Red Summer” portfolio, representing the stories in the American landscape where racial violence erupted between 1917 and 1923.

“Though the events of the early 20th century seem to be remote and fading apparitions of an American past, my work is concerned with the power and influence of our shared historical narrative upon the present,” White writes.

The project combines photographs of the contemporary landscape made at or near the sites of racial conflict, with selections of newspaper reporting from the time. The juxtaposition, White writes, “is a rupture and a conversation on the timeline between past and present.”

In “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies,” White produces photographs of Black material culture within public collections in the original 13 English colonies and Washington, D.C., including diaries, documents, receipts for the purchase of humans, musical instruments, doors, hair, photographs, and souvenirs.

“The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggest a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space,” he writes. “I am drawn to the stories ‘dwelling within’ a spoon, a cowbell, a book, a photograph, or a partially burned document.”

“Folding Time,” an exhibition of photographs by Wendel White, is on view through Oct. 26 at the Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum, 301 High Street West, Glassboro, N.J. 08028.