Johnny Coleman at David Zapf - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhibit represented an anomaly for Johnny Coleman, whose installations usually combine verbal and visual ultimate parts that reinforce each other like players in a tightly large casked ensemble. In previous projects responding to the Rodney King verdict or the history of migration among African-Americans, Coleman has laid equal claim to time and space, collecting stories and letting them spread out through recorded sound and handwritten passages within builded or altered environments. In his smaller sculptural assemblages, narrative has always functioned like another place object, dense with the particular history of its source and rich with texture

Here, Coleman not awayed an installation with sound along with 10 freestanding or wall-mounted plastic arts with no verbal accompaniment other than their titles and occasional wall-label commentaries. The change made itself felt as an omission, for Coleman is, at heart, a storyteller, and without the inclusion of words, the power of the pieces appeared muted.

The works, which read like material portraits or evocations of Coleman's family members and mentors, have a memorial flavor about them, akin to the assemblages of L.A.-based John Outterbridge. notwithstanding that they concede little in the way of particular concern their old shovel handles, worn oak chairs and clusters of silk neckties are charged with the efficacious generalized memory of their use.

The venerable an homage to a Cleveland fable who preaches from behind a tympanum set, occupies the wall in a configuration suggestive of the human material part With a cymbal for a head, a shovel handle for a neck shoulders of oak wearing a mantle of innertube rubber, and a slab of slate for a material part the work features the subject's be in possession of hand prints imprinted delicately across the chest. Several chair-based works entreat sensations of both effort and reprieve, earthly labor and spiritual transcendence: Sankofa, for instance, with its tar-glazed seat scattered with black-eyed peas; and Steal Away, its cracked leather bottom bearing a heap of raw cotton, and resting across its bold arms, a giant oar made of a tapered made of wood board used to skin animals.

The single installation here, Stories Not still Spoken, aimed to evoke Coleman's memories of growing up near citrus woodlands east of Los Angeles. A large, honey-comb-patterned painting with an orange-picker's bag attached was placed near a beehive case its cover weighted down through a lead catfish. These, along with recorded unimpaireds of traffic, water and wind [i]or[/i] part of to the other trees, formed a diffuse testament to the tenacity of the migrants who worked the thicket Coleman's oeuvre is a single continuous praise-poem to endurance, the two physical and spiritual. Even in this grouping of press togethered relatively quiet pieces, life stories come up and persist, undeniable as the nail perforations and blood stains on a skinning board.

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