Umbrella Church: The cadence of life and secret beauty, found
By Isabel Zermani
Salt Magazine
Seven years ago I was an art school drop-out who flew south to recover from New York City’s deadening overload. I took a job as a waitress, but a waitress at the art museum. Pockets stuffed with crumpled bar napkins and shredded pink Sweet’n Low packets, I’d walk the galleries after my lunch shift and hope my all-black outfit said I am a serious artist not I work in the restaurant. I was twenty.
I needed some respite.
I wandered into the very back gallery and encountered something divine. Umbrellas of all colors and sorts slowly opening and closing by tiny motors. Bellows wheezed through harmonicas, giving each creature its own sigh. A feeling of being underwater permeated the navy room as blooms of light and shadow played on the surface — the ceiling. It was an accidental symphony. It was Diane Landry's installation "Flying School."
Each umbrella creature rose on an inhale, shone its light, and exhaled on a plié at its own pace, as if learning to ride a very slow bicycle. I found myself rooting for them, those umbrellas. It’s funny where you find a mirror. I felt like a discarded umbrella. I saw myself in those creatures; recovering, learning, shining, dimming, sighing, and starting over. Their plight induced a sense of beauty and joy I hadn’t felt before. Like an iron lung, it filled me.
Everybody has their church. “Flying School” became mine.
I used to visit Calder’s Circus at the Whitney Museum in New York City. How I longed to see it move. Wheels turning. Axels grinding. The cracking of a whip. But the fleas had all gone home.
The same guard was still at CAM seven years later when I came to see Landry’s full exhibition The Cadence of All Things as a museum member, graduate, and art writer. We both have grown. He remembered my daily devotion to the umbrellas after the lunch rush.
“Flying School” cycles in the back gallery just as if it never left. To get there you walk the entire Brown wing filled with Landry’s work. Wilmington is an unlikely Mecca of modern art, but this is the largest retrospective of Landry’s work to date. For me it was Christmas, Rosh Hashana, and Ramadan all in one. I attended a lecture with the artist herself. Call it the second coming.
Diane Landry is a petite, unassuming French Canadian installation artist. She wears all black and a body mic — TED talk ready — but she wasn’t here to preach. She wasn’t here to perform, though she's also a performance artist. She, like her work, doesn’t boast, but draws you into the simple, revealing the performance that is already there. Everyday performances that are always happening. See that water bottle? Laundry hamper? Umbrella shadow? Regular life is her block of marble.; like a sculptor, she frees the art within it.
On the gallery tour with Landry the crowd gathered and papered the walls with our bodies around the umbrella hatchery. Faces illuminated from below as if by campfire. The harmonicas sighed. The kaleidoscope of ceiling shadows bloomed. Landry asked if anyone had any questions. We sunbathed in joy and wonder.
And I fell in love all over again.
Anne Brennan, CAM Executive Director, acknowledged the moment: “I love that. Nobody has a question. The answers are right here.” Her fingertips raise to her chin and her lips tremble.
Landry’s agent told me of her bravery. How she studied science and civil engineering and left that world behind to become an artist. How she supported herself as a postal carrier through art school.
Her curator told us of her ideals. Her feminist skis ironing a table of folded shirts called “Snow-Table”. Her environmentalist net of plastic cutlery called “Exhaustion” commenting on our over-fished oceans.
Landry smiled a poet-smile and said, “There’s nothing to understand. It’s just me making something.”
The distance between a laundry basket and religious experience is about two feet. Landry’s mandalas, a nod to Carl Jung, who popularized the circular Hindu art, are perhaps her most distilled and impressive work. A light on a rod and hinge orbits into the belly of a white plastic laundry basket mounted on the wall and then back out. As the light changes position, the basket’s shadow creates a lacy mandala fanning out on the gallery wall. Then the light retreats. The shadow shrinks like night-blooming jasmine come sunrise. The ordinary basket remains inconspicuous.
I now suspect secret beauty is everywhere.
“Knight of Infinite Resignation” recalls my dark night of the soul. Windmills of bicycle wheels spin at their own pace by some unfelt wind. A Midwestern mindscape. An empty fairground. Water bottles flare off the tires like daisy petals; each containing a small light covered and uncovered by sand. The light never goes out, but is only hidden. An ever-present sound-scape of shifting hourglasses lulls the watchers.
The title recalls a parable by the philosopher Kierkegaard of a knight who accepts his fate: that he will never have his love in this lifetime. He feels an infinity of sadness with a tiny hope for a chance at love in his next life. I see the lights as hope. Lights that never truly go out.
Diane Landry’s Exhibition The Cadence of All Things is currently on display at the Cameron Art Museum until January 12th, 2014. www.cameronartmuseum.com
Isabel Zermani (formerly Isabel Heblich) is a local writer, artist, and performer who seeks beauty and synchronicity wherever she can find it. Sometimes it finds her.