Transumanza
Extravaganza
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| Eons of History |
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| Eons of History (detail) |
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| Welcome to the Games |
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| Touchdown Town |
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| Touchdown Town (detail) |
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| Big Betty - One Swell Lady |
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| Big Betty-One Swell Lady (detail) |
By
Tom Wachunas
“… I deeply believe in the symbiotic
relationship between history and art. Both subjects are of the ultimate
importance to our understanding of the
world today.” - Carole d’Inverno
EXHIBIT: Transumanza: Massillon, Ohio / work by
Carole d’Inverno, at Studio M Gallery, in the Massillon Museum / THROUGH JANUARY 26, 2020 / 121 Lincoln
Way, East, downtown, Massillon, Ohio / 330.833.4061 /
Carole
d’Inverno is a self-taught artist who grew up in Italy and Belgium, moved to
the U.S. in 1979, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Immediately
after her proposal for this exhibit - titled “Transumanza: Massillon, Ohio” - was
accepted, she immersed herself in researching the history of Ohio, and more
particularly, Massillon.
Loosely
translated from Italian, ‘transumanza’ means crossing the land. As d’Inverno
explains in her statement, “…Transumanza
is, for me, both an action and a metaphor that can be applied to the historical
changes that have shaped the United States: our shared history of crossing
lands, breaking boundaries, accessing and losing territories, and our comings
and goings.”
In one sense, d’Inverno is a cartographer, a
maker of maps. While her very large paintings (up to 14’ in length) are not the
precisely measured geographic or topographic delineations of the sort you’d
find in an atlas, they’re nonetheless fascinating navigational documents. Made
with vinyl paint on unstretched linen, they hang on the wall from metal grommet
rings like unfurled scrolls, or sails, if you will, charting Massillon’s
zeitgeist - its cultural milieu. These paintings are a visual storytelling,
presenting a collective history, condensed and codified in deeply imaginative
panoramas embedded with all sorts of symbols, gestures, and markings which are
indeed an immersive mapping of a communal identity as it evolved through time.
With each of
the four major works here, d’Inverno has generously provided a key – a written
guide for identifying and interpreting her dazzlingly complex configurations.
You can consider Massillon from an archaeological perspective, for example,
when looking at “Eons of History.” Those sketches on the lower left represent
fossils from a prehistoric era when Ohio was under water - a tiny part of a
vast inland sea. Then, in the same painting, travel into the future as it were,
and find signs of ancient Native American ceremonial mounds, a Quaker church,
an Underground Railroad hiding spot, factories, football, and even a look at
the tent in Massillon Museum’s famous Immel Circus installation.
“Welcome to
the Games” remembers the oldest known Native American team sport in North
America – the game that became refined by European settlers and known as
Lacrosse. Linked to images of early native sticks and nettings are images of
Massillon Tiger football players. A fittingly raucous homage to local football
is “Touchdown Town,” along with an equally elaborate tribute to the Massillon
steel industry, “Big Betty – One Swell Lady,” the title recalling the nickname given to the
massive furnace in The Central Steel Company of Massillon.
Looking at
these works should rightly be anything but a sedentary encounter. If you get
close enough to read the aforementioned guides (which I highly recommend), then
you’re close enough to begin really savoring, to begin traversing the sheer
length of their intricacies - their
diverse rhythms and juxtapositions of shapes, lines, and very bold colors – one
slow step at a time. Call it a metaphorical, or metaphysical, walk through local
history. Treasure hunt, anyone?
Beyond these
inspired references to Massillon per se, the overall stylistic sensibilities
evident in d’Inverno’s paintings resonate with other histories and cultures as
well. Her iconography is a rich interlacing of organic and geometric markings –
often like so many runes and glyphs - that merge into sprawling sequences of
decorative patterns and narrative motifs. It’s an abstract iconography that harkens to considerably more
ancient artistic practices such as those found in Incan tapestries, or Aztec
manuscripts, or Australian aboriginal art, or Aegean art, or rock carvings from
northern Europe, or Tibetan mandala sand paintings, to name only some.
So there’s an
exuded aura, an exuberant spirit of contemplation and meditation in d’Inverno’s
scrolls. They actually transcend the specificity of Massillon history and
arrive at a potent connection to – and celebration of – the many cultures across all of human history which have embraced the
power of an abstract visual language to tell the story of a place, a people, a
time.
Additionally, I’m happily reminded that
abstract art has been with us since the beginning of…art.
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