Art: Never mind

By Erika Yowell

A new exhibit at the Charleston Heights Arts Center offers art enthusiasts an uncommon glimpse of the sort of academic-minded art not often seen in the valley. Simple Lullaby, on view through May 16, features K. Stevenson's sepia-toned shadow box prints and some larger free-standing sculptural works.

All the objects constitute Stevenson's response to the idea that, as her artist's statement says, "memory and perception are marked by error, exclusion, density and loss." That sort of language takes me back. Certain university-level criticism courses ardently invoke Roland Barthes' canonical work Camera Lucida to underscore the fleeting and mysterious play of memory and its relationship to the visual realm. Photography's inception allowed for the preservation of images and the consequent salvation of snippets of visual history from the distortion implicit in relying on recall alone.

Anyway, Stevenson isn't using photography per se in this exhibit. But stay with me. Her prints are framed with an eye for the nostalgic, using 1940s-era bull's-eye-corner moldings. There are some examples of digital imaging, as in one print titled "Simple Attachments," which figures a set of hands set in a cat's-cradle pose and bound with a chaotic web of real thread, which has been sewn into the substrate. The aforementioned sepia tones of her images recall those used famously in Victorian-era photographs by the likes of Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Her "Simple Stains" series of four prints have been sullied with drops and blotches of dusky substances--red wine, maybe? Coffee and rust? These imperfections also recall early photography, which captured environmental detritus in the printing process. It was not unusual for everything from dust motes to hair to be trapped in the colloidal muck that spawned these images. With Barthes on the brain, it's amazing the discourse that can arise out of the discovery of a single hair in a Victorian photograph: Look! Evidence of the artist's hand (or head)! What nostalgia! What loss!

Speaking of hair, which is a particularly rich medium for academic memory buffs, Stevenson uses enough of it in this exhibit to furnish the entire cast of Crazy Girls with new pageboy wigs. "Memory Bed #3/El Rio Madre de Dios" and "Malleable Memory #3/`Auntie'" incorporate great swaths of human hair in stunning, if slightly creepy, fashion. What exactly she's up to philosophically here may be elusive, but her show inarguably provides a departure from the slick 'n' easy decorative work most often seen around town.