An Epic Passage to Canaan
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| Hidden Passage |
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| A Brief Respite |
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| Look for the Grey Barn Out Back |
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| Stopover |
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| Friend or Foe? |
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| 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:
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.
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