An Epic Passage to Canaan

An Epic Passage to Canaan

Hidden Passage

A Brief Respite

Look for the Grey Barn Out Back

Stopover

Friend or Foe?

Nightlight

By Tom Wachunas

      “A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, Sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We want to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”  – Frederick Douglas

   EXHIBIT: Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad / at The Canton Museum of Art, THROUGH OCTOBER 20, 2019 / 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton, Ohio / www.cantonart.org /330-453-7666

  “For over 14 years, Jeanine Michna-Bales logged countless hours of meticulous research and traveled extensively to create this series of images. Her efforts culminated in the release of this body of work in February 2017, as well as the release of the trade publication from Princeton Architectural Press in Spring 2017, and the launch of a traveling exhibition from Mid-America Arts Alliance that is currently touring the United States until 2024…”

- from the artist’s web site, at:

https://www.jmbalesphotography.com/through-darkness-to-light

   After just a single step into the main exhibition space at The Canton Museum of Art, you’ll immediately feel engulfed in dimness. It’s an unexpected sensation of tangible dusk. You’re there to see pictures, but instead notice, at first, only dark brown-black rectangles on the walls. Curious, maybe even cautious, you get your bearings as you draw nearer to these things. With each step, your tentative walk in the waning light of day, as it were, becomes a progressively commanding sensation of being pulled  in, closer and closer, to peer through what might seem like windows on to landscapes where full-fledged nightfall reigns. Your eyes finally do adjust to their seemingly indecipherable opacity until, until…

   You’re immersed in a tenebrous immediacy. Looking into these beautifully subtle photographs by Jeanine Michna-Bales is to embark on an epic journey. As viewers we become vicarious travelers in an extraordinary odyssey: The Underground Railroad. Aided by the highly engaging and informative auxiliary exhibits here of other photos and artifacts, we become effectively sympathetic witnesses to a secretive trek, fraught with danger, following some of the same night-shrouded routes traversed by an estimated 100,000 slaves who escaped their Southern oppressors between 1830 and 1865 to find freedom in the North.

   Who could navigate these forbidding paths, enfolded as they are in gloomy night, with any sense of certainty? Who could determine actual nearness or distance with any sense of assurance? In these intensely compressed terrains, even shadows feel indistinguishable from the forms that cast them.

   Still, there’s light. It might be a whisper, a far-away glimmer, a ghostly reflection in a swamp, the risen moon, a pitch-black sky perforated by tiny stars, an illuminated farmhouse window. But light. A beacon, however faint or bright, of possibility. The idea of rescue, of safe haven. A call to compassion.

   And who would deny the timeliness of this exhibit? Michna-Bales’ stunning images resonate powerfully with our current – and volatile – societal concerns about immigration.

    Her art also reminds me of the original meaning of her medium - Photography, from two Greek words for light-writing. Interestingly, in all of their sumptuous tonal murkiness, these pictures are indeed a clear enough writing, a narrative. In the end, it’s not so much a story about the weight, the impenetrability, of darkness. Instead, it’s a compelling affirmation of light, and the dauntless determination to pursue it.