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Disappearing Memories Of Home

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In his new solo show at Reynolds Gallery, sculptor Raul De Lara takes a playful approach to images of his homeland in Mexico — a place that, as a DACA recipient, he cannot return to.

“I came to the desert to play with my homeland. No longer do I remember how she looks, feels, sounds, smells, or tastes. I came here because I miss her, and because she is invisible to me.”

These are the opening lines of the text written by Raul De Lara for his solo show, “Our Shared Backyard,” at the Reynolds Gallery, which opened earlier this month and will remain open for viewers until October 30. The exhibition displays sculptures lovingly and thoughtfully carved from wood into warm and brightly colored pieces that carry a little spark of something — life, maybe. There’s a vibrant playfulness in the cactus with a snowman mask, or the huge slab of tree that’s made to look as soft and inviting as the family futon. 

These sculptures, as playful as they are, also tell the story of De Lara as an immigrant, struggling with the political realities of life as a DACA recipient while finding ways to connect with happiness and the disappearing memories of his homeland. DACA recipients who immigrated to the U.S. as children, like De Lara, have faced efforts to end the DACA program since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 — putting legal residency in doubt, and “currently living in limbo” where residents can’t return to their homelands without forfeiting a chance of gaining U.S. citizenship, according to the Center for American Progress.

“As a DACA recipient I’m always at the edge, the verge of getting deported,” De Lara said. “I’m waiting to hear what the fuck the White House decides to do with me, which sucks because I’m not homies with the White House … Living in a world for me where I truly don’t know what’s gonna come tomorrow as a DACA person is hectic, but while I’m here and while I found myself this home in this community and this chance to have a voice and share it, that’s what I’m focusing on.”

De Lara said he believes the subtle humor of his sculptures is just one of many ways to “access the other side” of opinion on immigration. To De Lara, the sculptures don’t have to be aggressive or forceful to be effective. 

“I hope this brings people into my world rather than, like, me having to serve myself in a silver platter to the world,” De Lara said. “It always seems that we need to …  offer ourselves to this imaginary viewer that’s going to validate us, you know? I’m trying to let you know this world exists, and you’re welcome to claim it.”

De Lara said that often, immigrants have to frame themselves as agents of change, work, or trauma. While he said he believes these narratives are often true, he wants to prioritize the celebration of immigrants’ identities. Not everything immigrants do, De Lara said, needs to be about solving the problems of themselves and others. 

“It’s this idea of, ‘Why can’t I just be me?’” De Lara said. “Like, why can’t I make the work that comes from … from my country, or that’s rooted in me as the thing that it is, rather than having to tie the other external stories or occupy … language that I didn’t even understand?”

De Lara’s focus on storytelling is evident in his approach to crafting a narrative with the pieces he created for the show at Reynolds during his fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts. If the exhibition is a short story, De Lara said, each piece is a chapter of that story. 

“White Passing,” one of the most striking pieces in “Our Shared Backyard,” is a green cactus made from a linden tree with a smiling snowman’s face tied on like a mask. It’s inspired by moments of De Lara’s life when others have questioned his Mexican heritage.

“I’ve experienced different treatment from people from my country with my status who might look a little different,” said De Lara. “People telling me, ‘Oh, I don’t know if you’re Mexican enough to be making Mexican work.’”

The narrative that brings the chapters of DeLara’s work together is the text he wrote for the exhibition. It includes subtle nods to what De Lara wants viewers to learn about him — his issues with immigration, his interest in kink, and his gender-fluidity — that he introduced in a passage about interactions with border control officers that played with traditional power structure roles. 

These elements are not things that define De Lara’s work; instead, he uses these more intimate parts of himself to give context to the viewers of his sculptures. 

“The story is not fictional. It’s actually something that happened to me.”

As an artist and a sculptor, De Lara said he’s always had a disconnect between the object that he’s using and the story he’s trying to tell. His artwork is an attempt to resolve that distance. 

“There’s objects that can’t talk, right?” De Lara said. “In front of you, they’re not telling you, ‘Oh, I am about XYZ’ … Even as a little kid I was like, ‘How are people finding these crazy-ass meanings in this painting?’ Where did these stories come from? How can we have a closer connection between the thing and the story?”

De Lara’s connection to wood sculpture has deep roots in the value his family placed on beauty and craftsmanship. Growing up, De Lara was surrounded by people who regularly “used wood to create their world,” with hand-carved furniture. He feels he was born into a strong appreciation for craftsmanship and handmade artwork. 

His father, an architect, crafted wooden structures, and his mother, an interior designer, filled them with beauty. De Lara’s grandmother designed the interior of casinos, and would bring her grandson on trips to collect quality fabrics. “I come from a family of creatives,” De Lara said.

He spent time in his father’s wooden furniture shop as a child, recognizing the materials and form that would come to be valued in his later work. “My learning as a kid was always through my hands and through my eyes, and not so much through spoken word,” De Lara said.

In De Lara’s very Catholic family, carved religious figurines seemed to have the ability to heal and aid. “I think growing up in a family that believes that these little chunks of wood have magical powers also helped me be able to believe in my work and believe in art, and the object,” De Lara said.

The choice of the two trees he worked with to create the two largest wooden pieces in his exhibition, “White Passing” and “Soft Siberian Elm,” was “intentional,” De Lara said. Each tree came to De Lara in a moment of serendipity.  The first came from a man named Austin, who was named after De Lara’s Texas hometown and who also happened to be born there. When Austin’s Texan parents showed up, De Lara said that he thought, “Is this some sort of weird TV show? Are they gonna pull an intervention on me?”

The other tree was a victim of a thunderstorm outside De Lara’s fellowship studio in Boston. “We all woke up and this massive tree had fallen over in the parking lot,” De Lara said. “My car was parked right in front of it. If it fell the other way, my car would’ve been toast.”

Both trees came from trauma — one fell in a storm, and the other died from Dutch Elm disease — but De Lara focuses on giving the trees a new life, reborn as works of art that capture their spirits. 

“Ghosts and spirits — I’m a full believer in,” De Lara said. “I sometimes vibe with materials in that way. If I explain it verbally to somebody it sounds goofy to them. You know, it’s not as magical to explain to you that I think there’s a ghost in the sculpture, if I didn’t tell you there is.”

One of De Lara’s most important materials is the Mexican desert sand he collected after swimming across the Rio Grande, which he keeps in a plastic bottle, as described in the text written for the exhibition. This sand has become De Lara’s “salt and pepper” — he sprinkles it on every piece he creates, into every paint he mixes. That sand carries the weight of De Lara’s connection to his homeland, which he hasn’t returned to since he left at the age of 12.

“That sand, coming from a specific place that is sort of a transitional point … is sort of a portal,” De Lara said. “For me, there’s something magical there.”

All photos courtesy Raul De Lara and Reynolds Gallery

More Than a Candle: Sandy Williams IV’s Wax Monuments

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Originally inspired by Unite The Right, Sandy Williams IV’s monument candles are more relevant than ever today. Here’s what his was monuments can teach us about monumentalism. Hint: it’s a whole lot more than melting the dudes.

Sandy Williams IV has a new studio, courtesy of the University of Richmond, where he teaches. It’s painted white, with pipes running across the ceiling. “It’s probably one of the better studios I’ve ever had,” he said, a meek smile on his face as his eyes flitted across the room.

Williams’ shelves are stocked with rows of wax monument candles of different colors, each no more than a foot high. He picked up a silicone mold to show me the process, which involves casting a 3D print. It took him a minute to jiggle the statue free.

Williams never planned on becoming an artist, but his plans were thrown into disarray when he was 18. He’d been living the dream — high school prom court, involved in student government, and talented soccer player. His plan was to be an orthodontist, because it paid well. But then he was diagnosed with cancer, and all of that went away. He started to spend most days of the week in the hospital.

“Chemo is a trip. I went from being a normal high-schooler — homecoming court, prom, whatever — to just doing nothing but chemo,” he said. “After chemo I was like, well, how important is that paycheck if I’m not really doing something that matters to me?”

Sandy Williams IV. Photo via Instagram

Williams’ journey as a conceptual artist began at the tail end of his chemotherapy treatment in college at the University of Virginia. He took his first art class, an observational drawing class, to fulfill a credit requirement for school. 

“It really became this supportive community that I was missing,” said Williams, who was at the time used to 300-person Biology lectures. “I went from that situation to meeting daily with this professor who knew my name and knew my story, and was really invested in helping me get better.”

His early, more introspective work involved sitting in front of a camera for hours as the white balance struggled to even out his complexion. Now, in his words, “the lens has turned the other way.” His wax monuments are one of several projects meant to start a conversation about people on pedestals, and are years in the making. It all began with the Unite the Right Rally in 2017.

At the time, Williams was living in Charlottesville, and preparing to move away. “I was on my way to work actually – I was working as a waiter – and this truck of men with Confederate and Nazi flags drove by me and all threw Nazi salutes at me,” he said. “I was like, ‘I gotta get out of here.’” The right-wing rally took place at the Lee statue in Charlottesville, a familiar spot to Williams and his friends. Soon afterward, he departed for Richmond with monuments on the mind. 

In his first year as a Sculpture grad student at VCUarts, the air was just right for discussion. “We were doing tons of readings about monuments throughout history, what happened in South Africa and apartheid and what they did with their monuments, and so I decided to keep pushing it,” Williams said. 

It’s a weird feeling to look at tiny versions of these grandiose objects. In an interview with the Reynolds Gallery, Williams said that his monument candles are an opportunity to meditate on what the symbolism of the actual monument means to us. Or — for those who’ve contemplated enough and are ready to see the statue gone — to feel the relief of regeneration.

To make them, Williams starts with a 3D scan. Scans of monuments are out there; Williams explains that there are a couple of different foundations around Richmond that have been doing archival scanning of monuments. However, he said, “sometimes they’re not so interested in sharing them,” at which point he has to turn to the internet, or even do the scans himself.

Once he has a scan, he uses the materials available to him at VCUarts and the University of Richmond to make a 3D print, which he then casts in a mold. When the mold is ready, he pours wax into the negative space to make a candle.

The first candle Williams ever made was the easy-to-scan Jefferson monument, as seen on the UVA campus. Then, taking a slight departure from Confederate generals, he made a Lincoln. This choice, he explained, was to expand the depths of his message. “Especially within the setting of an art gallery, it was a very left-thinking conversation, when my intention was more radical than that. It wasn’t just about ‘melt the racist monuments.’” 

Williams felt that the typical art-world conversation about monuments needed to be widened in scope. “The conversation was getting simplified or flattened,” he said. “It was a missed opportunity to have real conversations about changing the infrastructure of the system, not just who sits on the pedestal, but really why we’re building these giant pedestals to people who aren’t here anymore when there’s so many people that need that space.”

When it comes to the subject of memorialization, Williams’ practice isn’t limited to his monument candles. One of the ways in which he explored this idea was in his cleaning of the Statue of Liberty monument in Chimborazo Park earlier this year. Like many of Williams’ pieces, it had a simple exterior that contained a much more complex project. 

“It wasn’t even a Confederate statue. It was this random Statue of Liberty that was put there by the Boy Scouts of the Robert E. Lee [Council] in the fifties, during segregation, in Chimborazo Park, which is this memorial to the largest Confederate hospital during the Civil War,” he said. “Right after the Civil War, it was a freedman community. But there’s not a single sign commemorating that activity, right? All of the signs are just about the importance of the space to the Confederacy, but it totally washes away the history of the fact that after the Civil War, hundreds of freed slaves lived there before the city evicted them. The city was doing things like buying people one-way tickets to Chicago and Philadelphia, just to push those people out of the city.”

His idea was to invite people to, in a way, introduce themselves to the statue. Touch it, change it, care for it. In doing so, they would “activate” the statue. This process can be empowering to those who feel helpless against tradition, and it provides an opportunity to reflect on what the statue means to us while performing a public service. At least, that’s the hope.

There were complaints. Two or three times a day, a voice called up to Williams from the sidewalk, worried he might damage its natural patina. “Mind you, I got permission from the city,” he said. “I got permission from the police department, I got permission from parks and rec, so I was very much allowed to be doing what I was doing.” 

Nonetheless, he went ahead and explained what he was doing to those who stopped and questioned it. “I still felt it was important to have those conversations,” he said. “And now, in what they are considering a crisis situation, they’re like, ‘All right, we’ll just take [the Confederate statues] down.”

While Williams supports the removal of the monuments, he doesn’t want the complexity of their impact to be overlooked.  

“It’s so much deeper than just the statue. It’s a thirty-foot symbol of the racial inequality that’s existed in this country since forever,” he said. “Lee is just the biggest symbol. It’s in murals all over the place; it’s in pictures in restaurants. The more I worked on it, the more I started to notice — it’s just everywhere. It’s become such a representation of what Richmond is. And I think a lot of people are tired of being represented in such a way.”

Making monuments is only half the battle, though. To take full advantage of their artistic potential, Williams likes to melt his wax monuments in front of their originals. Considering it’s illegal to perform any kind of demonstration in front of monuments, this has been a bit of an obstacle for Williams at times. When he attempted to melt his Lincoln statue at Washington DC’s Lincoln memorial, Williams approached the guard. “He was very nice about it. He was like, ‘Somebody’s gonna call me in about 15 minutes to say that you’re doing something, and after that I’ll give you ten more minutes to finish your project before I tell you you need to leave.’ So I was like. ‘Okay, right on — we’ve got 30 minutes.’”

In Richmond these days, though, such complicated negotiations may no longer be necessary in the fight to deconstruct such symbols. “Now when you see people setting up PA systems on the Lee, and so many different voices get projected around the area, that’s totally the conversation that I was interested in pushing, that all of a sudden is very much the reality of the situation,” he said. “It went from being like, ‘Ah how do you push these conversations?’ to… ‘I don’t even need to do that work anymore, it’s just happening.’”

Seeing this change occur means a lot to Williams. “Just thinking about the ways in which those spaces are so inaccessible… unemancipated is another word I’ve been using,” he said. “When you look at what the Lee monument had going for it before the uprising started… and now, the life that exists around it, the activity. I think that really encapsulates what this project meant for me when I started it in 2017.”

Back when Williams started making art in college, his professors made it very clear that fine art is not a lucrative path. They told him he’d spend ten years a student, ten years as an emerging artist, twenty years as an established artist, and then maybe become famous. 

“And I was like, ‘Jeez, I should’ve gone to med school! It’d only be 8 years,” he said. “But it works out in its own ways, even if it’s not going to be selling your work for millions of dollars. There’s so much else you can get out of it. Monetarily, it’s definitely a struggle… I get rejected from things I don’t even remember applying to, just because I’m applying so often to things. Whatever it is, I’m throwing my name in the hat. It’s just part of the grind, part of the practice.”

Williams moves with patience. At one point, when I asked if he had enough time to finish the interview, he said he had plenty. He was just planning on working in the studio that day.

“Making it was never a concern of mine. If I die next year, I will have at least left marks of my being,” he said. “I think building this foundation on my work being important to me, first and foremost, before any outside recognition, that’s how I’ve been able to persist for so long. Even with this candle project.” 

Clearly, his continued work has paid off. When he got started, nobody wanted to buy a candle for $20. Now, he’s working with 1708 Gallery to raise thousands of dollars for the Jackson Ward Youth Peace Team through sales of his wax monuments. As of right now, all of them are sold out.

You can check out the full collection of Sandy Williams IV’s wax monuments on his website.

Top Photo courtesy Reynolds Gallery

Two Sides Of The Craft

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Two posthumous retrospectives of Richmond artist Cindy Neuschwander’s work co-operate to show the way art evolves over the course of an artist’s life.

The late Richmond artist Cindy Neuschwander is taking over the art scene this summer with two posthumous exhibitions at 1708 Gallery and Reynolds Gallery. Neuschwander, who passed away in 2012, was a Richmond native and graduated from VCU in 1986. The two exhibitions of her work that are currently on display represent two different phases of her artistic life. Her art is often identified with minimalism and abstract expressionism, but once you see her work, you’ll realize these labels alone don’t do it justice.

Image via 1708 Gallery/Twitter

Opened on July 5, the exhibition at 1708 Gallery, What were you after then? What are you after now? has pieces from Neuschwander’s earlier work, created between 1984 and 1990. The exhibition mostly features photographic collages, text, painting, and scraffito, a technique that involves scratching away at paint or plaster to reveal a hidden lower layer.

On June 13, Reynolds Gallery also opened a Cindy Neuschwander exhibition, A Measure of Life. The exhibition contains some of Neuschwander’s later work, dating from 1999 to 2010. Some of the pieces are part of the private collection that was left to her husband and art dealer, Jay Barrows, after her passing. Some of the pieces at Reynolds Gallery have yet to be seen by the public. 

Image via 1708 Gallery/Twitter

According to Park Myers, the curator at 1708 Gallery, there are some stylistic connections and mark-making present in Neuschwander’s early work that she carried through into the later work that’s on display at Reynolds. There is a lot of emphasis on eyes in the images, as well as a focus on couples, whether it be significant others or a mother and daughter. Some works seem to deliberately shroud or mask body parts such as arms or legs.

“Some are more jubilant or about an intense relationship, and they are met with the same level of color saturation, mark-making and scraffito,” said Myers. “What’s interesting is the way she begins to abstract the figure in these early works, but still includes the actual figure.”

In other works, these body parts are more abstract. The works disconnect these appendages, making them seem more like geometric shapes than any part of a human body. “When you’re deciding to hide certain parts of the body, it involves a certain type of psychology and identity representation,” Myers said. “When she tries to either hide something or expose something, she’s making psychology that is very internal to the work itself, or speaking outwardly to the viewer.”

Swelling Clusters, 2009, oil and wax on panel, 16 x 16 x 3 inches (via Reynolds Gallery)

There are clear differences between the pieces at 1708 Gallery and the newer work on display at Reynolds. By the time of her later work, her art had become more abstract and minimalist. A Measure of Life also introducing Neuschwander’s work with encaustic painting, a mixed-media technique that involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments have been added. Due to its temperature, the beeswax can be manipulated in a variety of ways — shaped, etched, or even removed to leave a shadow of its presence behind.

While Neuschwander’s art varies between the differing periods on display at the two galleries, there is a clear connection between her stylistic choices in the different eras. One can even see some of the recurring themes or patterns from her early works showing up in new ways in her later work.

“You can feel the several distinct series and periods that she was working in,” said Julia Monroe, co-director at Reynolds Gallery. “Some works are geometric, some are encaustic.”

Coda (blue green), 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 6 x 6 inches (via Reynolds Gallery)

Some of the earliest works in the 1708 Gallery show date back to Neuschwander’s college days. Meanwhile, “The Couple,” a self-portrait of Neuschwander and Barrows together that is included in Reynolds Gallery exhibition, is one of the last pieces she worked on before her passing. When viewed as a whole, the work provides a detailed picture of Neuschwander’s life as an artist, and helps demonstrate the themes and objects that were most important to her throughout her life.

What were you after then? What are you after now? is currently on display at 1708 Gallery, located at 319 W. Broad St in the Arts District. It will remain on display through August 18.

A Measure Of Life is currently on display at Reynolds Gallery, located at 1514 W. Main St in the Fan. It will remain on display through August 23.

Top Image via 1708 Gallery/Twitter

Current offers unique contemporary art fair for experienced and novice collectors this weekend

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Richmond’s first contemporary art fair is hitting the scene on October 20. Current is a brain child of several local gallery owners and directors including 1708 Gallery, ADA gallery, Candela Books + Gallery, Glave Kocen Gallery, Page Bond Gallery, Quirk Gallery, and Reynolds Gallery.
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