Lately, there’s been a lot of art about the foreclosure crisis. It isn’t hard to tap into the drama of disaster and broad social change. To some degree, most of us have felt the impact of the worst economic breakdown since 1929 — even if it’s just abandoned properties making for an (even more) depressing view from the SUV on the way to an art opening.
But that’s an unfair crack. Most local artists and art patrons live
in the city or in the hard-hit inner-ring suburbs. Some have even lost
their houses. Others — like photographer Donald Black, who
returned to Cleveland in 2007 after a few years in New York City to
found nonprofit arts-education organization Nonverbal Communication
— have observed the crisis from a ringside seat. From his
headquarters on the southeast side, Black has spent the past two years
hiking around the neighborhood, capturing the broken rhythms and random
combinations that forced vacancies leave in their wake.
His color and black-and-white photographs on display in For
Closure at Convivium 33 are a strangely beautiful body of work. A
basement window clotted with cobwebs and spattered dirt is neither a
rare sight nor a sure sign of economic ruin. That such a thing might be
beautiful is far from an original thought, yet in Black’s hands, the
subject is lovely in unexpected ways. He makes a triptych from the
window’s three panes, evoking a punch-drunk time of order hidden in the
downpour of cold northeastern hours. Leaves press up against the glass
as if blindly seeking shelter, while tall plants stretch in the murky
light beyond, outlined against a neighbor’s white clapboard wall.
“For Vanity” shows a rounded tub, typical of Cleveland’s century-old
housing, reflected in the bottom corner of a cabinet mirror. Light is
drawn along the tub’s perfect porcelain edge. Zig-zag-patterned
wallpaper peels below the mirror, and everything is glazed in the
greenish light cast by an old green-painted house, like a study in
geometry from an ideal emotional realm.
Black’s photos document the beauty of common things, stripped and
simplified by neglect. Similarly, Tim Lachina’s bright color
photographs in Convivium’s smaller foyer gallery show harmonies
syncopated by hasty departures.
Lachina is a celebrated Cleveland designer who has worked with
periodicals like Muse, the quarterly published by the Cleveland
Writer’s Center, a.k.a. the Lit. He did the layout for For Closure‘s catalog, sponsored by the Lit. It includes work by
Cleveland poets and writers, penned in response to Black’s imagery. The
writing and photography make for a mostly seamless mix of imagery and
verbal improv.
This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2009.