Page 38 - The NOISE November 2015

GOLDEN EGGS, EAGLE HUNTERS, AND WESTERN OMELETS Sky Black’s paintings are featured at STORY BY
IMAGINATION AND REALITY AT BRANDY’S Brandy’s this November, alongside ALLISON KLION the photography of David Edwards
Brandy’s Restaurant and Bakery has been a Flagstaff family staple for over twenty years. It’s the kind of restaurant every good town has; solid food, an intimate yet hurried atmosphere, and proprietors who care about the community they live in. Brandy’s is the type of place you take your new lover when you’re showing them your hometown, where you take your grandson the morning of his third birthday, and where your family has been going for 22 years.
In 2014, Brandy’s longstanding commitment to supporting local artists was recognized by the Flagstaff Arts Council’s Viola Award for Business for the Arts. The Flagstaff Arts CouncilholdstheViolaAwards,“Flagstaff’sOscarsforthearts and sciences,” to celebrate artists, educations, organizations, leaders, and businesses who make positive contributions to the arts and sciences in the city. In a region where art galleries tend to feature as many local artists as possible in lieu of the solo show, artists often rely on restaurant exhibitions for more focused attention. While customers eat breakfast or lunch, they’re able to admire the work of a local artist above their booth, as if over their kitchen table at home. This setting is perhaps more conducive to art patronage than a traditional gallery, where for just the length of the meal, they’re able to envision how they might live with that artwork.
Indeed, local painter and muralist Sky Black, whose work is currently featured at Brandy’s in an exhibition alongside the documentary photographer David Edwards in a show called “Imagination & Reality,” has gained a significant fan base through exhibiting at the restaurant. It’s an unusual pairing; on the surface the artists and their work couldn’t be more different. Twenty-three year-old Mr. Black paints technically precise, symbolically loaded compositions that draw heavily on the Surrealist’s juxtaposition of natural and fantastic elements. Framed Giclée reproductions of his paintings are on view at Brandy’s.
Largely self-taught through manuals on painting technique, Mr. Black gushes — in conversation — platitudes about the importance of“good”color and light, and on the Romantic life of an artist. Mr. Black’s goals seem to be achieving a certain degree of technical virtuosity and unfettered self-expression. His youthful zeal for art-making and unabashed confidence in his abilities lends him a magnetic presence, which has served him well during his recent tenure in Flagstaff. He has boldly announced his presence through the two-year execution of the Sound of Flight mural with the Mural Mice, R.E. Wall and Margaret Dewar.
Mr. Edwards left a career in the film industry to become a still photographer in the 1980s, which eventually led to a move from San Francisco to Flagstaff to pursue adventure
photography and river guiding full-time. His independent spirit is more suited to the solitary, self-directed life of a photographer. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Der Sturm, and Outside Magazine, to name a few. The photographs he’s showing at Brandy’s are largely from an expedition to Mongolia documenting the Kazakh golden eagle hunters. They are honest and intimate looks into a faraway and ancient culture.
The first trip to Mongolia Mr. Edwards took was a quest to learn the origins of Afghanistan’s highly dangerous national sport, buzkashi (goat-grabbing), which he first witnessed on assignment covering refugees of the Soviet-Afghan war in the late 1980s. The game, which originated among the nomadic Turkic peoples of China and Mongolia in the 10th century, involves riders on horseback grabbing a headless, disemboweled goat carcass, circling the field and delivering it in a goal. For obvious reasons, Mr. Edwards did not include any photographs of the game in the show at Brandy’s. These photographs so impressed editors at National Geographic, however, that they sent him back to the Altai mountain range in Western Mongolia to cover the Kazakh eagle hunters.
The juxtaposition of Mr. Edwards’s quiet and truthful photographs with Mr. Black’s imaginative prints is unexpected, and at first seems oblique. However, two pieces hung adjacent on the back wall of the restaurant, Blue Eye by Mr. Edwards, and Last Kingdom by Mr. Black, shed light on their artistic strengths, and the meaning in their pairing. While Mr. Black dislikes the specificity of portraiture, masking faces behind clouds and glass boxes filled with hummingbirds, or chopping them off altogether, Mr. Edwards is a master of using the face to tell a story. Where Mr. Edwards captures the beauty and mystery of the world, Mr. Black populates familiar landscapes with unexpected, surreal creatures that suggest a rich interior life.
In Blue Eye a Mongolian man in a thick, fur hood stares intensely at the camera, cropped just past the centerline of his weather-beaten face, so only one unexpectedly blue eye is exposed. He stares directly into the camera with stoic, quiet confidence. Shot at close range, and cropped tightly, his face and hood fill the whole of the wide, narrow frame, which allows the viewer to study the effect his way of life has made its mark on his face. He is a young man, but a life spent outdoors in the snowy mountains of Mongolia has etched fine lines across his face. Though he’s protected by a thick fur hood, you can feel the sting of icy wind across his reddened cheeks.
For Mr. Edwards, a good photograph has an elusive quality that leaves the viewer wanting to know more. “Literally it’s like a layer of transparent cells, there’s a layer of mystery, there’s something enigmatic,” he says. “A really good photograph
doesn’t tell you everything, it leaves questions ... it always has a consequence [or a cause] that you’d really get to see.” His photographs capture something very real, recording a place and its people. The power of the image comes from the photographer’s ability to identify an engaging subject, and through lighting and composition present a powerful image that sparks the mind to wonder.
Last Kingdom, by Mr. Black, places an enormous lion with a bejeweled and burning Manzanita bush growing from his golden mane in an epic, Grand Canyon landscape. He lies coolly at the edge of a flat mesa and gazes with narrowed eyes over his left shoulder, unbothered by the flaming branches long-established in his scalp. In the distance, black rainclouds carry a storm eastward over stepped mountains, and leave the golden glow of a setting sun upon the lion’s face. In writing about the painting, Mr. Black describes the alighted tree as,
“the flame burning inside of my own head when I painted it,” alluding to the flame of creative passion. This creative passion is both the source of the symbolic lion’s power and domain over his surroundings, but it also threatens his demise. I hesitate, however, to ascribe too personal an interpretation upon the painting, as the symbolic imagery Mr. Black includes in Last Kingdom, and in all of his paintings has significant historical art precedent. He builds meaning in his works through the accumulation of a symbolic language that doesn’t necessarily add up to a single interpretation, and the interest lies in the puzzling work of unpacking his strange narratives.
Throughout the rest of the show at Brandy’s we are taken on two parallel journeys over our eggs. Each of Mr. Edwards’s photographs shows the breadth of his travels. We warm our bones over salt milk tea with a Kazakh elder in his cabin, and stare into the open beak of a screaming Golden Eagle as it lands on a powdery bank. He takes us to a Buddhist monastery at the banks of a holy lake in the Sichuan Province of China, and into the mountains of Nepal.
Sky Black’s prints take us inside his mind to shorelines where crumbling classical statues protect golden Faberge eggs, and mute swans emerge from clouds and ships rise up like horses at the edge of the beach. We see the wide world beyond the comfortable booths of the local diner, and we leave not only sated, but also expanded.
David Edwards and Sky Black’s “Imagination and Reality” is open at Brandy’s Restaurant at 1500 E Cedar, Suite #40 in Flagstaff through November 30. 928/779-2187 BrandysRestaurant.com.
| Allison Klion will take a side of art with that, thank you. arts@thenoise.us
thethe
2328 • SnEoPvTeEmMbBeErR22001155•• NNOOISISEEaratsrts&&nenwewss••ththeennooisisee.u.uss